blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Related posts:

1. Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?
2. Financialization and hegemony
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2

We’ve had a continuing discussion on this site of the status, relevance, and use of Marxism (and other ‘-isms’ – Lenin, Mao, and anarch) today, in relation to revolutionary work or the possibilities of an emancipatory politics in today’s world. Most recently, we’ve had some debate and a series of contributions, beginning with my “Marxism or Anarchism or —-,” continuing through Vern Gray’s response, “One, Two, Many Marxisms?” and the comments to this by Nat W., myself, and Vern Gray.

Here I want to continue one strand of that discussion: the question of the adequacy of Marxism (or Maoism, or —) as the basis for an emancipatory politics today. My own position is that, although I’ve been and in some sense still am a Marxist and a Maoist (a sense which will hopefully be made clearer below), I don’t believe that either or both provide such a basis. We need what we haven’t got.

At one point in the discussion I polemicized against the model of moving from Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist, or MLM) theory and its conclusions, applying them to our present situation, using creativity and “the Marxist method” to overcome the problems stemming from the fact that the world has changed, and thereby creating a revolutionary synthesis which would serve as a foundation for a revolutionary praxis.

I then said,

This is the model that I am contesting. Such a process will not result in a revolutionary praxis today. Something like this model may have been sufficient in the past (and this is worth discussing much further), but it’s radically inadequate today. Why? Not simply because the world has changed. But because the basic Marxist template, in all its permutations, has become exhausted—not Marxism as analysis, but Marxism as an unfolding nexus of social theory-and-practice. (In Badiou’s terms, this truth-process has become saturated.)

Vern Gray replies:

 I must admit that I do not understand how it could be that Marxism as analysis has not been “exhausted,” but that it has become exhausted as an “unfolding nexus of social theory-and-practice.” What sort of process of unfolding theory-and-practice is not informed by, and then more than that, integrated with, a good analysis?

Nat W. states that he looks at

MLM [Marxism-Leninism-Maoism] as method and a launching pad from which to start reconception…. It maybe true that starting from any method of analysis (and certainly any “body of doctrine”) will not necessarily lead to a revolutionary praxis. That being said, I think that certain methods of analysis (particularly MLM) give us a better chance at arriving at such a praxis….If it is indeed true that Marxism has become saturated then that is one thing. That must be shown in its own right.

What’s at issue

The issue that has been most explicit within this back-and-forth is that of Marxism (and Maoism) in their relation to an active politics, especially today. The relation between these, in my view, is not simple and requires delicate and thoughtful treatment (which some of our formulations, mine included, have not embodied).

In the intellectual work and questing which is a strong aspect of what we need today, we need a wide intellectual horizon, and active exploration, including in unlikely places. But the idea that all our resources are on a level, that every thinker is of equal potential value – this sort of flaccid eclecticism (which what I’ve said has been taken to imply) is very far from anything I’ve ever held or thought. We are situated historically in relation to a revolutionary tradition which is broadly Marxist, and so we have a particular and continuing relation to Marx. (At the risk of drawing fire from a different quarter, I would say that this is also true of anarchism in its revolutionary strands. But that’s another discussion.)

But the nature of this relation, as well as of its terms, require careful delineation. Above I used the phrase “a revolutionary tradition which is broadly Marxist,” and it is here that the question of “many Marxisms”should be situated. Analytically the unity and diversity of Marx’s work, as well as of Marxism, is an important and interesting topic, which would require a very long discussion. Politically the question is simpler, in that a politics which takes there to be a “one true Marxism” whose articulation and defense is a primary political task, or which will guide the “one true revolutionary politics” – this, I hold, is a mistaken and sterile approach to politics and to the search for a political way forward, especially now. Likewise, if the thought is that Marx formulated a science which has been and should be the basis of a politics (a position which has historically had currency) – no.

What is needed, and what has sometimes existed (but does not now), is theory within the context of which an actual emancipatory politics is situated, lives and grows. Marxism has played that role – or, rather, Marxism is the name for a trajectory of a nexus of revolutionary striving and aspiration, of thinking/acting,

This mention of thinking/acting points to what I believe is the central issue here. I will use, for the purposes of this short essay, some of the vocabulary with which we’re all familiar – practice/theory, primarily – rather than Badiou’s terminology (event, truth-process, fidelity, etc.), and I want to start with some remarks about the concept of practice as I understand it.

The primacy of practice

We are all familiar with the thesis that practice is primary within the practice/theory dialectic. This statement has, as I conceive it, two senses, which are analogous to the two senses of the priority of production in relation to distribution, exchange and consumption, delineated by Marx in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. Production is primary within the entire process described by the four terms, in that it is the point of departure within a process, which overall forms unity; but production is also primary over all the elements of the process, including itself in its more restricted identity within the process.

Likewise, practice is primary in that it forms the point of departure within the process of practice/theory; but practice is also primary overall, in relation to both itself and theory as elements within the process. (There are analogies in this – but also disanalogies – to Mao’s distinction between principal aspect of a contradiction and principal contradiction.)

To state it in another way: we could say that there are certain practices in which we are engaged. Within a practice – a project, a life activity – there is both theory and practice: these are the dialectical moments within the process. Of these moments, practice is the point of departure, primary as between them. But practice as the overall project, which may be said to constitute a practice, is primary or principal with regard to both its moments. (It was this relation that I have been trying to point to, no doubt obscurely, by talking of the “practice/theory nexus.”)

Detachability

I think that this understanding of practice has strong implications for how we construe the body of what we’ve been accustomed to call revolutionary theory. Specifically: Is this theory a knowledge, achieved and detachable, or is it the theory of a revolutionary practice – in the larger sense of practice sketched above – integral to that practice and bound to it by a thousand threads? I hold that it is the latter.

(I borrow the term detachable from logic: once a conclusion – a theorem perhaps – has been proved, it can be detached from the premises and the proof-process through which it was generated, and asserted in itself.)

It will be objected that this contrast is too stark, that this is not a strict dichotomy; and in a certain complex way (which I hope to be able to explain at a later time) this is true. But drawing the contrast sharply serves a purpose: it is the integrality of emancipatory theory to its practice which requires emphasis – always, but especially today.

What happens when that practice, the practice to which the theory is bound and of which it is a part, comes to an end (or virtually so)? That is the question that frames our situation, the question that has been at issue, in reality, for more than 30 years (unrecognized though it may have been by many of us). It is the question, in Badiou’s terms, of the saturation of a truth process.

Continuity and break

There is a strong continuity – recognized by us and felt by those who participated – running from Marx and Engels, the “red edge” of the revolutions of 1848, and then later the Paris Commune, through Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution and Mao. (For Badiou there are some discontinuities and differences of truth-processes here, but I’ll leave that aside for now.)  I do not view this sequence, let me make clear, as a march of orthodoxy or “the correct line,” proved through “successful revolutions” and excluding assorted others (anarchists, Trotskyists, council communists, “Western Marxist” thinkers, etc.) as traitors, heretics, or utterly mistaken wanderers in the swamp. The relationships here are far more complex.

Historically there is a relatively continuous trajectory. That continuity has been broken, not simply as a form of thinking or as a theoretical matter, but as a practice or chain of practices in the world. Popular upheavals from the late 1970s on, from the Iranian Revolution and Solidarity inPoland, through the recent “Arab spring,” have not occurred, have not had their reference points, within this Marxist tradition. The continuity of this trajectory has been decisively broken.

Thirty years plus – this is a long stretch of world history, which demands real investigation, thought, and explanation. To declare that “nonetheless, I remain true to the principles of Marxism (of Maoism, of —)” is not an instance of any of these. And to attribute this more than thirty-year break to the errors or betrayals of leaders or “the subjective forces,” or on the other hand to “objective factors,” is not an explanation but simply a refusal to think. (To be clear, none of these descriptions is a reference to anyone who has contributed to the discussion on this site; but we’re probably all familiar with exemplars of these attitudes.)

We are left with the residue of an exhausted truth-process, or to put it differently, theories for which the social practice has for the most part died or ceased – the social practice, that is, of which these theories were once a living, changing part.

We cannot simply use these theories as a basis or guide to resurrect the practice or practices of which they were once an integral part. Nor can we wait for an outbreak or an upsurge, then expect to come into them with our assured theories (our Marxism, our Maoism, our specific strand of anarchism) and have those theories take hold and play a leading role. (All of us with much political experience can think of tens or hundreds of examples here.)

But we also stand in a position to this revolutionary tradition, and to the theories which have been part of it – a trajectory which is not just “our tradition” but that of the struggles and highest aspirations of “the masses” – of humanity in fact, which is a continuing tradition and present actuality. The question now is what form – in both practice and theory – these strivings can take, in order to continue as a communist quest, to reassert “the communist hypothesis.”

That, in short form, is our situation today, and the conditions of our work.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: Badiou — Another Take on Revolutionary Theory

Communism as actual

Bosteels begins by talking about the Idea of communism as a Kantian regulatory idea (a framing which Badiou broaches, and then seemingly retreats from, in The Idea of Communism), brings in Hegel on actuality as well as Marx’s statement in the German Ideology that communism is the real or actual movement which abolishes the present state of things, and then brings forward his own aim or hope:

The point is somehow to perceive communism not as a utopian not-yet for which reality will always fail to offer an adequate match, but as something which is always already here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation, and in every act of collective reappropriation. (39)

All of this in the book’s Introduction. In the chapters, as said, he examines particular thinkers – Alberto Moreiras, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Ranciere, Alvaro Garcia Linera, of course Alain Badiou, and the inevitable Slavoj Zizek (in particular the last four) – with the aim, he says. of asking whether their proposals “open up a perspective for the actualization of communism.” In all of these he shows himself to be a very sensitive critic (see in particular the chapter on Zizek: “In Search of the Act,” obviously much expanded and revised since its original 2001 version). And whatever the original context of these essays (all of which have been revised for their appearance here) it becomes clear in reading them that this question – what he’s calling “the actuality of communism” – has been for some time one of Bosteels’ most basic concerns.

It’s in the last chapter (the fifth), though, reworking the final section of his contribution to the 2009 London “Idea of Communism” conference, and here titled “The Actuality of Communism,” that this concern comes to a certain sort of crux. The chapter is a meditation on the writings – and career – of Alvaro Garcia Linera, who as mentioned above has gone from guerrilla fighter to Vice President of Bolivia.

After a few pages outlining some themes from Garcia Linera’s work, Bosteels draws two conclusions with regard to our tasks in the present era. The first concerns actively continuing to historicize the communist hypothesis, and in particular carrying it “beyond the confines of Western Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.” (238) Drawing from Badiou’s work on communism as Idea and hypothesis, Bosteels continues,

The key concept in this regard is not the orthodox one of stages and transitions in a linear dialectical periodization but rather that of the different aleatory sequences of the communist hypothesis in a strictly immanent determination, with all that this entails in terms of the assessment of failures…and of the legacy of unsolved problems handed down from one sequence to the other.

The second task (and one that directly speaks to Bosteels’ concern with “speculative leftism”), involves the realization that

Communism must not only be rehistoricized outside all suppositions of historical necessity and stageism, it must also be actualized and organized as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things….Communism must again find inscription in a concrete body, the collective flesh and thought of an internationalist political subjectivity.

Returning to Garcia Linera, and taking up specifically his thinking concerning his entering the state and its relation to the ‘communist horizon’ which he invokes, Bosteels quotes him as aiming “to support as much as possible the unfolding of society’s autonomous capacities.” (247) Socialism, he says,

Is not the ideal to which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is above all the practical movement of the common struggles of living labor in communitarian form to recuperate its expropriated capacities. (252)

I will not pursue Bosteels’ examination of some of Garcia Linera’s reasoning and the disputes to which they may give rise. But a general admonition (as it were) by Bosteels, characteristic of his outlook and approach, is worth quoting:

I would argue that we need to avoid two extreme and equally nefarious answers: on the one hand, the wholesale condemnation of all such articulations of the communist hypothesis and the State…; and, on the other, the relativist conclusion that what may be bad for Paris or Bologna may be good for Kathmandu or Cochabamba…. We have use for neither blind and arrogant universalism nor abject and ultimately patronizing culturalism. Instead what is needed is a comprehensive and collective rethinking…of the links between communism, the history and theory of the State, and the history and theory of modes of political organization. (248)

Concluding

In the book’s “Conclusion,” Bosteels seeks to draw out multiple conclusions, particularly concerning the relation of politics to philosophy, to history, and to morality:

As might be expected, Bosteels seeks to rein in the overweening pretensions of philosophy, which he believes has often, in Europe in recent decades, taken its own reflections on politics to be politics:

My goal is to instill a degree of modesty and realism in the reflection concerning politics and philosophy. (274)

With regard to history, Bosteels is even more modestly cautionary and corrective. At present, he says with reference to Badiou and Zizek, “this recourse to the eternal, the invariant, or the ahistorical can certainly be justified, given the depoliticizing effects of the call constantly to historicize…. (277)

Whereas dissolving the supposedly natural and eternal into the historical (as Marx and others did) may once have been liberatory,

Today, the drive to historicize everything is rather part and parcel of late capitalist ideology as such, as is the emphasis on difference, flux, and multiplicity. (277)

And yet:

And yet, given the equally pressing need to avoid lapsing into an ultraleftist purification of communism outside of any given time and place, I would also want to argue for a dialectical articulation of the nonhistorical with concrete analyses of the historicity of leftist, socialist, and communist politics. (278)

Bosteels’ third conclusion, he says, “involves the effects of a growing moralization of politics,” which has “tended to rephrase questions of power and strategy in the melodramatic vocabulary of Good and Evil.” (279)

Here again, while in accord with the necessity of escaping “the pseudopolitical rhetoric of moral outrage and indignation,” this cannot be effected through seeking “a return to pure politics outside of morality, history, economics, or the social.” (282) This sort of “Gnosticism or Manichaeism” as Bosteels calls it here, is of course precisely the sort of speculative leftism against which he has earlier aimed his fire.

What Bosteels proposes against such speculative leftism, though, is “not to adopt the attitude of the Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought police” by denouncing it as an infantile disorder or the like, but rather that we go forward as a “communism of communisms” in which speculative leftism can have a sort of corrective place (serving as “a constant source of revitalization”) – an “actuality of communism in which there is room for movements and hypotheses no less than for tactics and strategy.” (283)

Finally – and this will be his fourth conclusion –

Communism cannot and will not be actual without also being international…. This means that we cannot let Western European history lessons…determine the agenda for the rest of the world. It also suggests…that we look elsewhere for models or counter-models to put to the test the hypothesis of the actuality of communism. (284, 286-7)

What do we need?

We might say, then, that what Bosteels is arguing for is a politics, or a specifically political thinking, which is which is taken up from a perspective which is in/of the world, historically situated, and internationalist.

He wants a little less philosophy and a little more politics in the concrete (and a lot less Eurocentrism) than he finds among current European left-radical thinkers. He wants a communism which has roots in what is actual and not simply ideal (and certainly not the stance of “the beautiful soul relying on its ineffectiveness as proof of its moral superiority over and above politics as usual” [127-8]).

He believes that communists should be able to see and think the actuality of communism in the world today – the seeds, the roots, the stirrings, the actual potential. That communists should be able to think and see a connection between communism and the world today – and not one which derives from the ideality of philosophy or the majesterial presence of a master thinker.

It would be hard to dissent from this desire and this belief, and difficult to deny that Bosteels has a point with regard to the theorists he examines. Who hasn’t grumbled, winced or cursed at the apparent over-theoreticism and esotericism of many of these thinkers? And, whatever the merits of Garcia Linera, Eurocentrism is a charge that hits home.

However.

A major question must be whether in fact it is speculative leftism which is our main danger today – the chief pitfall for communists or political radicals more broadly. This seems, sometimes, to be Bosteels’ position.

To answer this question, everything will depend on the context. But for most of “the left,” even “the radical left” (and particularly in this country) it seems that this diagnosis does not fit at all.

From the standpoint of movement activism, theoreticism and speculative leftism are not even on the horizon. “Enough talk about theory and doctrinal differences, let’s do something,” with practice far predominating over any sort of theory, is strongly characteristic in my experience. And in the US generally, with its deep legacy of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, succumbing to the rightist temptation of union and Democratic politics is the characteristic vice, not over-involvement in a theoretical point of view.

Among the organized “hard left” too, rituals of dogma notwithstanding, speculative leftism is hardly a danger; here too, rather, various forms of rightist practice, movementism, and actionism predominate. Even the academic left at present tends far more strongly toward social democracy (including in its theorizing), than toward anything describable as speculative leftism.

But as a critique and diagnosis of a specific intellectual environment – a certain (important!) current of European and especially French politico-philosophical thinking – Bosteels’ analysis of speculative leftism is quite valuable. Respectful and written with care and close attention to details of text and argument, I like it a lot and I think Bosteels has articulated a problem and danger within this current, which tends toward surfacing even among those who (like Ranciere and Badiou) explicitly wish to avoid  it.

What about khukuri?

The charge of over-emphasis of theory has been sometimes raised against this site, with its slogan of radical reconception of revolutionary theory. What about practice? Is Khukuri dedicated to the proposition that the solution to our problems lies simply in the realm of theory?

Well – the fact that khukuri is a site dedicated to theory doesn’t imply on anyone’s part that theory is the only thing needed. But it is true, I believe, that without a basic reconception of revolutionary theory we can’t go forward. It’s an absolutely necessary part, in the present era, of the project of human emancipation. Necessary, although obviously not sufficient.

Our needs again

Practice – this is basic — is not only necessary but primary, in an overall sense. “The overthrow of all existing social conditions” (to quote the Manifesto) is not accomplished – actually accomplished – in the realm of theory. “The weapon of criticism,” to quote the wellknown passage from early Marx, “obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force.”

Of course the next sentence is: “But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses,”  bringing in the theory/practice, idea/matter dialectic (to use those old simplistic terms for a moment). It’s tempting to conclude that the theoretical task is to create that theory which will grip the masses, and in an overall sense that’s true. (And it’s a ready index of our present impoverishment that there is no such theory at present – no truly emancipatory theory which has gripped and become embodied in the struggles of the masses).

But it’s also true that it’s vain to think that one can enter a future period of intense social struggle with the needed theory already in place. A new emancipatory synthesis, a new path, a theoretical structure which actually grips the masses, will undoubtedly arise only in the context of a new mass practice. What do we do in the meantime? Wait for something new to arise? Well, yes, partly and in some sense. But in the meantime no one is preaching complete abstention from practice (not me, anyway).

But is “practice” so straightforward? “Just do something” is worse than useless as a political recommendation – that’s pretty obvious to all, I’m sure. Do what, and where (there are many possible fields of action), and how?

It’s easy enough to say that whatever one does, it needs to be revolutionary, not reformist practice. But what are the forms of revolutionary practice today? I submit that this is a question without a clear answer at all. Not to sit on our hands, but in my view what’s needed is deep and wide-ranging experimentation with new forms and new venues of practice.

Practical experimentation and theoretical reconception – if I could propose a slogan, that would be it.

And to return to the latter:

The taking assessment of our position, thinking in a deep and exploratory way about how a new revolutionary current might arise, understanding the structure and dynamics of capitalism and its classes as they exist now, really taking clear-eyed stock of our history, of the history of emancipatory movements and institutions – all these are theoretical tasks that cry out to be done. Nor are they simply interesting projects – “yeah, it would be nice if we had all that”; these are pressing revolutionary tasks. It’s certainly not clear to me how we can possibly get our bearings at present, and not simply engage in the mindless repetition of everything we’ve done before, without this sort of theoretical work.

To give one variation of something Zizek has recently often admonished: “Don’t just do something – Think!”

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. What is Badiou’s communism?
3. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?

John Steele

In another context in which I’m involved the subject has come up, sometimes rather heatedly, of the critique of Marxism from an anarchist perspective. Now this is a debate I’ve heard for 40+ years, from both sides, and usually posed in the same rather abstract terms. There are vital issues embedded within this debate, from revolutionary strategy and organization to historical determinism and freedom. But rooting these issues within this abstract and global dichotomy – anarchism versus Marxism – doesn’t offer a very fruitful context for carrying out the very necessary explorations and debates around these issues, particularly now.

I’ll start from a critique of the terms in which this debate is usually cast, and of a particular form of argument, but my aim is to move beyond debate and critique and to point toward a different conception of the relation between doctrine and revolutionary praxis. The point at which I end will probably raise more questions than it answers, and I hope these questions will be raised and serve as a basis for fruitful discussion.

The Debate

I believe debates such as this – Marxism: for and against; Marxism or anarchism – suffer from a number of problems which make them not only irresolvable but politically unproductive. In the first place, it’s fairly useless to debate the rightness or wrongness, correctness or incorrectness, of either anarchism or of Marxism in themselves. We might as well debate the correctness of ‘the left’. The first question would have to be, Which left, and when? – and the same question applies to anarchism and Marxism. All of these terms cover a much too various territory to be analytic terms in themselves. (I’ll come back to this.)

But more importantly, what does the present historical moment call for?

What does the present historical moment call for? I believe it does not call for holding fast to principles and positions as they have come down to us, nor for restating traditional dichotomies and lines of demarcation. This is a time of crisis for capitalism, but it is also a moment which has thrown into relief what was already clear: a deep crisis of the left, to the point where the term has become virtually meaningless. To say that the problem is a lack of any popular movement from the left, or of any significant emancipatory social force, is simply to state the obvious. The question is, why is this? The reason is primarily, in my view, ideological and theoretical. By this I do not mean that the problem is one compromise and deviation from true revolutionary principles (not being true anarchists, not being true Marxists, etc., etc.). The problem is that we do not have an emancipatory ideology and theoretical structure which is adequate to this time, which will meet the needs of the people (intellectual and inspirational needs as well as others) and show a way to human liberation.

What the present historical moment requires is a deep-cutting and overdue reconception of revolutionary theory. (The aim of this site is to aid in this task.) Of course this involves critique – clear-eyed and unsparing – of the traditions out of which we have come: Marxist, anarchist, Leninist, libertarian communist, etc. But the emphasis has to be on the creation of the theory, the ideology, the forms of organization and the modes of practice – all of what we need and do not have.

That said: I hope the above will be a sufficient context for what I want to do next, which may superficially appear to be a defense of Marxism. My aim, though, rather than that, is simply to argue briefly for an historically (and textually) contextualized approach to our revolutionary heritage. To say that this heritage doesn’t give us what we need today is not to say that it’s not a valuable and necessary resource. (More on this below.) It is capable of being such a resource, but only if it’s understood accurately and in its full historical complexity. I take up Marx and Marxism simply because this is the tradition out of which I come, and which I know well. (And Marx is a figure – I’ll admit it – very dear to me.)

What is Marxism?

In approaching Marx, I want to speak in favor of complexity, nuance and an appreciation of the fact that what we have in Marx’s writings is the output of a long arc of intellectual (and political) change and development. There is not just “early Marx” (Economic-Philosophical MS) and “later Marx” (from German Ideology on). There were several stages or permutations within the “later Marx.” Roughly, there’s German Ideology and the Manifesto, then there’s the Grundrisse and then Capital, and later still, the writings after the Paris Commune and Marx’s correspondence with Vera Zasulich in Russia (Civil War in France, Critique of Gotha Programme, and the Vera Zasulich correspondence*) – and there are major differences between these “stages,” not least with respect to what he says about the state.

Marx was not simply saying one thing all his life.

That’s one aspect. But then the other is that, even within a period, there are gaps and silences and unresolved problems. The fact is that Marx did not create a completely integrated and self-consistent theoretical structure – let alone an integrated theoretical/strategic/practical edifice. (Althusser – yes, Althusser – has a very good essay on some of the gaps, incompletenesses, and ‘limits’ of Marx’s thinking; it is called “Marx in his Limits” and was written in 1978 but only published posthumously. A pdf is available here.)

After his death, though, Engels and Kautsky did their best to forge such a smooth and complete edifice, which became the official Marxism of the Second International. But that, too, was not the only Marxism, looking at the past 100+ years. Besides those strains existing earlier, the 75 years following the Russian Revolution saw not only Second International social democracy versus Third International communism, but “western Marxism,” various strains of both Trotskyism and libertarian communism, Maoism, Eurocommunism…. There’s not much point in arguing (nor do I believe) that some of these were “not really Marxism.” It’s more accurate, I think, as well as more politically fruitful, to view these as stemming from a combination of the contradictions and incompletenesses of Marx’s theory and different approaches to the problems posed by new historical circumstances.

Several Marxes, many Marxisms. And haven’t there been (aren’t there now) many anarchisms?

I began political life (just about 50 years ago – gulp!) conceiving myself as an anarchist (I was a pacifist as well), positions that it took me quite a while (years and years) to work through, with my finally concluding that my position amounted to a form of liberalism. The point of this being not to say “I once was an anarchist too, so therefore…”, but simply to point out that there can be liberal forms of anarchism, just as there are liberal forms of Marxism (as well as many other forms and permutations of both), and to ask again how useful it is, in seeking political orientation today, to pose the question as Marxism vs. anarchism. I don’t think we can get very far unless we zero in on more tightly defined questions, and unless we’re consciously oriented toward trying to build the sort of theory needed today. (There are a lot of questions and problems just in that last sentence that would be much more valuable to explore than that of Anarchism vs. Marxism.)

How not to argue against Marxism

Another point I want to raise has to do with a common and seductive way of arguing for the useless or pernicious character of Marxism. This is, to say it very shortly: State systems whose ideological legitimacy-structures rested on or appealed to Marxism (the Soviet Union under Stalin being exhibit number one) – these states were in fact tyrannical and evil. Since Marxism developed into this, and was capable of playing this ideological role, we can or should therefore conclude that Marxism constitutes a pernicious political framework and should be discarded as a resource for emancipatory politics.

One form of objection to this argument is to say that it isn’t really Marxism that was at work in the USSR under Stalin. While there’s a truth in this objection, it does not end up as a very satisfying or valuable point, eventuating typically in the assertion that Stalin (or perhaps Lenin) distorted Marxism, which in turn tends to imply (or be part of the assertion that) there is a true or correct Marxism which must or should form the basis of a true politics of emancipation. This is precisely what I do not want to say, for reasons along the lines of what I’ve sketched above.

Rather than this route, let’s look at the form of reasoning here, which is one which I’ve elsewhere called reverse implication to origins – the idea that a characteristic of a phenomenon can be imputed back to the phenomenon’s origins. The argumentative move, in other words, might begin from the wrongness or evil of a phenomenon, call it X; this characteristic of X is projected back to a beginning or seed of X, which is then itself presumed to be wrong or evil.

As I just said, I don’t want to follow the line of objection to this move, that the seed from which Stalinism grew is not really Marxism. But regardless of whether this is true or not, this move from result to origin is not, as logicians say, a valid argument-form: it does not follow (pretty obviously), from the fact that a characteristic is true of the end result of a process, that the same characteristic can be attributed to the origin or beginning of that process. If this were the case, for example, then the properties of a full-grown human being would be true of the initial union of sperm and egg from which it originated. (This example obviously highlights the fact that the form of reasoning here is that often used by opponents of abortion, who begin from the wrongness of killing a person, projecting this ethical predicate [wrong to kill] back to the moment of conception.)

But I think the discussion so far also highlights how abstract is this whole mode of approach – as if there were an essence or inherent characteristic, born in Marx’s thinking, which developed and came to fruition in Stalin. Not only is this not how historical development takes place (as if developments in this country could be understood as the coming into being of “the ideas of the founding fathers”), but – and this is really where I want to go – this is not how politics can really be practiced, as an attempt to grapple with the forms and development of human social being in the world.

How not to argue for Marxism

Here I just want to indicate a direction. There have been many, many bad arguments for Marxism, often advanced with great arrogance and assurance. (I’ve made a few of them myself, at points in my life.) Usually they have been put forward under the mantle of science (of history or of society). Sometimes the subtext – or the source of assurance in its espousal — has been the power of an existing state structure.

Marxism as science and Marxism as ideology of state power are not any part of what I espouse. Nor do I believe in the conception of Marxism as a recipe for revolution; it is not a blueprint which communists try to put into practice politically. (That, at any rate, is a conception of Marxism – and politics – that I reject.) The point is not to deny that Marxism is, or strives to be, a general theory. The question is: where does politics, and communist praxis, begin – where does it start from? What I am saying: it does not start from Marxism (or any other basic philosophy or theory). Rather, Marxism is a resource for politics.

Now there are all kinds of ways in which a theory can be a resource (in the case of Marxism, some of these might be: to help understand the dynamics of capitalism, to help understand human history, perhaps, to help understand the relation of emancipatory politics and communist praxis to history). In this sense of resource, though (as a help to understanding, for example), Marxism has no privileged status: it’s a rich resource, but not the only one. It’s certainly not a complete theory that “explains everything,” as it’s sometimes been taken to be.

To indicate how Marxism can be a resource, not just for understanding, but for a communist political practice, I want to quote Badiou, from his 1982 Theory of the Subject:

Science of history? Marxism is the discourse with which the proletariat sustains itself as subject. We must never let go of this idea….Marxism is the practical discourse for sustaining the subjective advent of a politics….For Marxism, seized from any point which is not its effective operation which is entirely of the order of politics within the masses, does not deserve one hour of our troubles. (44, 129, 128)

In an extreme and intransigent form, this may show the direction I wish to indicate. Whatever deep value Marxism has had and may have for an emancipatory politics, it is not as a knowledge, but as a “practical discourse for sustaining the subjective advent of a politics.”

______________________________

* Marx wrote four drafts of a reply to Zasulich, who had written in 1881 asking about the possibilities of the Russian rural commune in the transition to to communism. Unfortunately most of the drafts do not seem to be available online. The first draft is available here, and a recent piece on Marx’s “later period” here.

Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3

Cutrone’s paper strongly attacked Badiou, whom he characterized as a typical ’60s new leftist, deeply anti-Marxist, who would “reduce communism to the perennial complaint of the subaltern.” The others of us on the panel looked far more favorably on Badiou.

Parenthetically, what became far more clear to me at the conference is that, despite the group’s stated orientation of “self-criticism and self-education,” Platypus represents a very defined political position. In a nutshell: Marxism as the self-consciousness of the bourgeois revolution,and proletarian revolution as the fulfillment and culmination of the bourgeois revolution. I don’t raise this in order to discuss it, but simply as an observation.

The following is not really a discussion of Badiou’s thought — certainly not a deep one — and does not attempt to assess his central philosophical positions. I’m simply, rather, attempting to address a question on a somewhat more crude level: Is Badiou, as a thinker and actor in today’s intellectual/cultural/social milieu, playing a valuable role, politically?

Why is Badiou of political value?

John Steele

I assume we all start out from “Marxism” (certainly I do) – but what does this mean?  There have been, and will be, many Marxisms, and the way to deal with this fact is not to believe that we have somehow to excavate the “true and only” Marx or Marxism, but to recognize that the fact of many Marxisms is based not just in history but in the writings of Marx himself (as well, of course, as those of his close associate Engels). Marx did not create a completely integrated and self-consistent theoretical structure – let alone an integrated theoretical/strategic/practical edifice.

It is obvious that there are several (or many) strands and interpretations within the Marxist tradition. Most of these accept the “unitary Marx” thesis. In actuality, though, several strands of thinking co-exist in Marx and his writings, which do not necessarily form (in fact do not form) a self-consistent, integrated whole. Even within the critique of political economy, the most fully developed part of Marx’ work, there is (notoriously) more than one crisis theory.

But leaving all that aside, let’s preface the question of Badiou’s value by asking: Why is Marx of political value? First a point of clarification on the sort of politics I mean: the politics – to say it very broadly and for the moment without further elaboration – of human emancipation. Given that this is our politics, or our broad political aim, then what is of political value can be characterized, equally broadly, as what conduces to, or what is helpful in working toward this aim. (Obviously this will be relative to historical situation.)

So Marx is of political value if his works conduce toward this, and for quite a bit of the last hundred and fifty years he’s been thought, on a very broad scale, to be valuable in precisely this way. Now of course a lot of the finding-Marx-of-political-value during this period was built upon an understanding of Marx as the creator of a science of society and a metaphysic of history which limned a sure course of development and eventual victory – a thesis, and an understanding of Marx, which I reject, as I’m sure do most here. That was a Marx, and it’s a Marx which has lost the political value it may once have had, but this is not the only Marx.

Turning to my subject, my thesis is that for us, at this historical moment, Badiou, in his writings and his public stance, is of political value. Or perhaps, less sweepingly: He speaks to the situation and dilemmas of this historical moment in a way that I think can help us move forward politically.

Marxism

Part of the reason for his value is the fact that he does not pose his work as a development of Marxism. Although I would claim Badiou for Marxism (and for Maoism, as I’ve written elsewhere), it’s salutary to find a thinker who defines himself politically in terms of communism, who traces a complex identity with all that communism has meant in the 20th century, including the Russian and Chinese revolutions and their ramifications, but who does not seek to derive, deduce or define a contemporary emancipatory politics simply in those terms, nor in the language (for the most part) of this tradition.

This is a good thing, part of why Badiou is of political value, because this trajectory of revolutionary politics, along with much of its language and terminology, is dead – dead in the sense of being a living force in the world socially and politically. Let me make make sure what I’m saying is clear here, and guard against misunderstandings.

Marx is an intellectual and political resource – and Lenin, to cite just one other name, but along with many, many others – and it would be unthinkable for any contemporary emancipatory politics to attempt to do without this resource of past thinkers and actors. So I don’t mean at all that the works and example of Marx (& etc.) are dead, useless, outmoded. As I said, we always need to beware of imposing a false unity and integration on this past, and to be alive to its contradictions, unevennesses, gaps, anomalies. But to say that Marx (etc.) is a necessary resource for rebuilding is clearly not to say that Marxism (or “Marxism-Leninism,” or —) is a living political/social force: it was – and there were many problematic aspects, but there was a living movement with a broad commonality of thinking and acting in the political realm: a subject pursuing a truth-process, in Badiou’s terms. This no longer exists as a real and living social/political force – that’s obvious. What’s often not so obvious to leftists is that the point is not to resuscitate or resurrect what has died.

Badiou: some terms

Before moving on into Badiou, let me just mention some of Badiou’s key concepts as they apply politically:

Event (this term has a specialized meaning in Badiou). A Badiouian event is a momentary break in the ruling or hegemonic structure of things, an opening out of which a new truth process may be born. To quote Badiou from his recent Communist Hypothesis, it is “a rupture in the normal order of bodies and languages as it exists for any particular situation….What is important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities.”  (242-3.) Not the realization of an already existing possibility but the creation of new possibilities.

Truth process. Politics – that is, a particular political sequence – is conceived as a truth-process. Politics is an autonomous realm, which forges its own truths through truth processes. Thus political truth processes and their truths are not derivative from those of another realm (such as philosophy, ethics, economics, etc.). Emancipatory politics as truth-process: both terms are notable and important. After a certain point a particular truth process becomes saturated (Badiou’s term) – in effect it reaches an impasse. The truth-process beginning from the Russian Revolution has (long since now) become saturated.

To sum up what I’ll call the beneficially destructive aspect of Badiou:

I think this emphasis on the autonomy of politics is important and valuable. Is he correct in saying this? I’m not completely sure. But what is valuable is this emphasis – because it helps to pry us loose from a century or 150 years of making, or trying to make, politics an appendage of something else – of economics, often, or of philosophy. This illustrates a prominent way in which Badiou can be, and is valuable politically: not because he outlines a new, grand theory to which all should give assent (and this is not at all the way it is, btw, in Badiou’s stance or in the attitudes of his fans and students), but in marking a new possible approach, which will at the very least have the virtue of challenging wellworn and habitual left platitudes, which have shown themselves by this point (in fact by long ago) to be thoroughly unfruitful.

Truth

Politics as truth – why truth? Why is that valuable? Actually of course, what Badiou says is not that politics is truth, or that a real emancipatory politics represents truth, but that any real politics is constituted by a truth process. Both words should be taken in full weight.

Let’s take the second word first: politics is process – not achieved or hoped-for result, and also not a proceedure based on recipe or body of knowledge (at least not knowledge taken as knowledge, so to speak – on which see more below).

Rather, it is a process beginning not from what exists or from knowledge of what is (including its contradictions or tendencies), but from an axiom (or axioms). Now this insistence on an axiomatic beginning might seem to introduce a strong element of decisionism – as if the starting point is something arbitrarily decided upon, or some wished-for thesis taken as beginning point: a sort of utopianism. But this is not Badiou’s thinking. Rather, this axiomatic beginning is taken up as a starting point in view of an event, another key term (as we all know) in Badiou’s thinking.

An event, in Badiou’s rather technical sense, is not a grand happening. It is not even a noteworthy “thing that occurred.” It is, rather, more like a little flicker, which might easily pass unnoticed, and which will pass unnoted in the historical annals unless it becomes the beginning of a truth process. An event gives a momentary glimpse, not of possibilities inherent in what exists, or in history, but (to repeat) a glimpse of the possibility of possibilities. And the axiomatic beginning of a truth-process is the taking of a stance: it is to assume that these possibilities are real. Or even more: to explore the world, to act, as if these possibilities will have already become true.

Thus politics – actual, emancipatory politics – is a leap in the dark. It is not action based on what we know, or what can be known. It is action based on a gamble, on the making of a very serious bet, not even on a possibility (to say it again), but on what would be the case if the implications of that initial glimpse of the possibility of what might be are followed out and made true.

To take up political truth-process is to assume that axiomatic beginning in practice, to take it up fully and follow out its implications – that is, to act on the supposition of what will have become true, given the axiom’s truth. This is not a toe-in-the-water attitude, or a testing-it-out-to-see-whether stance. It’s a leap which can only be made with courage and confidence – a confidence which cannot be founded in the world which surrounds the one who leaps.

So we can clearly see the process part; and we can also start to see what’s meant by truth here. Badiou makes a strong distinction between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is achieved and relates solely to an existing state of affairs – a situation or a world, in Badiou’s terminology. Truth, on the other hand, is always processual: always in process, never achieved (else it changes to knowledge, and relates to a new and achieved world or situation). The reference of truths is in the future perfect: what will have been the case should the political practice which is the truth process come to fruition and succeed in changing the world (making a new world). Truth can only reach a state of achievment (when it then becomes knowledge) retrospectively.

If we want to say that what is true must correspond to a state of affairs, then we have to say that truths, for Badiou, correspond to a state of affairs to be brought about only through the agency of a subject and its associated truth process.

Now I just mentioned the subject associated with a truth process. Badiou’s theory of the subject is a big topic, which I will gloss over here. But let’s at least note that the subject here is not an individual person or consciousness, but something trans-individual. Badiou describes the subject as a new body, constituted by the trace of an event, and oriented around a truth process.

Political value

But leaving that thorny topic aside, let’s return to the question of political value.

The concept of event is what’s most often taken from Badiou. This is important, yes, but there’s much more to Badiou than simply the admonition to be on the lookout for what is new, or for upsurges of rebellion. There is this admonition, if it’s understood with sufficient openness: what we’re on the lookout for is the possible beginning of a new truth process, not something we’re calling on to conform to an already-existing political template. (A good place to see how this works for Badiou is in his recent remarks on the uprisings on Tunisia and Egypt, one of which have been reprinted here, the other on Kasama.)

Communism as process and axiom – not goal

Marxism as it has existed, and to a lesser and more ambiguous extent in the writings of Marx, has built politics upon a theory of history, a progressive historical schema (obviously very much part of enlightenment thinking) which projects a sequence from pre-capitalist society through capitalism to socialism and thence to communism, within which socialism becomes the proximate revolutionary goal, and communism is over the horizon, but a state of things to be achieved in the end. In this context politics becomes an activity which is both teleological (guided by a particular goal to be achieved), and instrumental (a process serving as an instrument for the achievement of this goal).

Badiou’s conception is a challenge precisely to this: Communism is immanent within the process of emancipatory politics: an axiom, not an objective, a process, not a program. (I owe this formulation to Don Hamerquist.)   The “communist hypothesis” informs the political truth process, not as a plan or program, nor as a goal, but as the general and over-riding defining axiom. (In fact, Badiou holds, nothing will count as a political truth-process which is not defined by this axiom: he says that it is the only real political Idea – another term used in a technical way by Badiou, which I will dodge for now.) Communism (note: not socialism – another question to discuss another time) communism as axiom and process restores real contingency to politics, and at the same time cuts against a pragmatic orientation. Politics is a process of agency, a subjective process – that is, proceeding through a subject.

This process is not a strategically mapped-out march toward a pre-established goal, but an aleatory process, following a necessarily chance-ridden path.  And in fact – isn’t this how revolutionary politics has actually proceeded, even though it is not how it has conceived of itself as proceeding?

The 2nd and 3rd Internationals (as well as Trotskyist variants of the latter) understood politics to be a matter of proceeding from scientific and historical analysis – and yet whatever real politics took place (and I do think it did, in particular places and times during this long period), was much more along the lines of what Badiou outlines, than the mythical self-understanding which was its ideology: real politics here too was, in practice, a leap in the dark, guided by a basic postulate, without assurance of success or where exactly what the end result would be. Look at any of whatever you may choose as great instances of revolutionary politics in the 20th century, or in your own experience, and I think this will hold true, if examined with full honesty. It certainly holds true in my own experience.

That aside, though, and whether you grant that this has been the case, I think it would be hard to deny that any emancipatory politics of the present historical moment would or must – if it’s going to take place – fit Badiou’s open but anchored process.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: When Everything Seems to Change — Badiou and the Event
2. John Steele: Badiou — Another Take on Revolutionary Theory
3. John Steele: Marxism, Politics, and Evil

Khukuri features several essays by Bill Martin, and he is a participant in the Kasama Project, with which both this site and Kasama are associated. He is the author of a number of books, including Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rack, 1968-1978, and (with Bob Avakian) Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics, as well as others.

This is the second engagement with Ethical Marxism to appear on this site. The first, by Vern Gray can be found here.

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

In this essay I’ll be attempting to come to grips with Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, a major effort by Bill Martin to map out the sort of theory he believes to be necessary in the 21^st century for revolution and human liberation. I’ll first try to lay out Martin’s principal claims and lines of thought, followed by some questions and critique.

This is a large book which brings a number of themes, subjects and questions into play. I will only be dealing with the essential line of argument and thought, concerning Marxism, politics and ethics. Specifically, I will not be able to enter into some concrete questions which Martin casts as ethical and to which he devotes a large proportion of space in the book: imperialism, animals and the human consumption of meat, and the question of place. These are major parts of the book, not only in bulk but conceptually too, as attempts to both configure political questions ethically (imperialism) and to situate ethical questions (meat-eating) within a Marxist context. But although this study does examine some of the forms of argument which emerge in these areas, I have not been able to consider the substance of these questions, as they are framed in Ethical Marxism.

As will become clear, I think the theory sketched in Ethical Marxism is seriously flawed, and I will often be sharply critical. But I want to salute at the outset Martin’s attempt at the great and necessary task undertaken here, the refiguration of Marxism in the light of past impasses and present needs. I hope I’ll succeed in making clear the ways and extent to which I believe that the questions and problems which Martin is attempting to solve by means of this approach are very real and unresolved problems for all revolutionaries in this era.

I

The principal and overall thesis of Ethical Marxism (EM) is that ethics and politics need each other, that neither by itself is sufficient – sufficient for a just society, for revolution, for the emancipation of humanity, for the redemption of the world. On the one hand “ethics does not have, by itself, what it takes to be ethical” (25; numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in EM). That is, ethics in itself does not have the power to make effective its own insights and conclusions, cannot of itself bring the good and the right into being in the world: “to make these things a real force in the world, we also need something like Marxism” (26). On the other hand, neither does politics (or history or economics) have what it takes to be other than realpolitik, another way of regulating or taking part in the scramble among human beings and groups in pursuit of self-interest.

Martin argues that there is a “kind of vision that is absolutely necessary for the transformation of society and yet is underdetermined by systematic study of the ‘social evidence.’ In terms of modalities, the vision is necessary for the transformation, but the vision does not represent the necessity of the transformation itself.” (x) This vision springs, Martin believes, from what he calls “the religious perspective.

Since the vision of the future does not spring directly or necessarily from a study of the present, but yet this vision does not represent or imply its own necessity, there is still a gap, which Martin proposes to bridge through ethics: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos [end or goal] might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps.” (49)

Martin relates these three aspects or moments – scientific description/explanation, ethical prescription, and future-oriented vision – to the three questions, which Kant thought encompassed the concerns of reason: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? He also seems to relate them, as Kant did, to what he sees as three discontinuous discourses: science, ethics, and religion. (Although at one point Martin makes ethics central, as well, to vision: “…the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of ethical relation at its core” [160]. In general the emphasis throughout is on the discontinuity of science from both ethics and “the religious dimension,” with little or no theorization of differences between the latter two.

Thus “this book is about how the ethical point, or what I sometimes call the ‘ethical moment’, is indeed needed, and along with it intentionality and responsibility (and agency) and even a discourse that partakes of transcendence and theology.” (4) Such a perspective, he argues, is vitally needed in order to strengthen Marxism to enable it to “become a more powerful instrument for guiding humanity in going from an unjust and unsustainable world to a global community of mutual flourishing.” (4)

On the one hand this is posed as an external critique, in that it is grounded outside of Marxism as such, in both religious and ethical perspectives. (In the latter case Martin takes Kant to be the definatory figure.) But on the other hand Martin believes he is pointing to something that is present but unacknowledged and untheorized, both in Marx (“Marx’s work is permeated with moral concepts” – 2) and in the life of revolutionary movements. In pointing to the need for “the ethical moment” he is reaching for “a conception that is at work in actual revolutionary processes, and that would play an even greater role in human emancipation and critical emancipatory theory if it were clarified and embraced for what it is.” (14)

Although at one point describing the project of the book as one of making explicit and fleshing out what is already implicit or taken for granted in Marx (230), generally and on the whole Martin seems to be working from the conception of a Marx and Marxism which has no place for ethics (or intentionality either), but only for the description and projection of material forces.

Martin’s most basic thesis, then, is that Marxism and revolutionary theory generally, on the one hand, and ethics and the religious dimension, on the other, need each other in order to fulfill their own most basic aims and functions. The aspect that receives by far the most attention in this book is the need that Marxism has for ethics. This is a work addressed chiefly to those who see themselves as within or deriving from the Marxist tradition, arguing for the necessity of “the ethical moment.”

(Although the religious perspective would appear to be equally important to Martin’s overall conception, this aspect receives little sustained focus here, although it does make a reappearance in the book’s Conclusion, where religious narratives are described as “stories that people themselves tell in the living of their lives under specific conditions, but under the twin imperatives of mortality and the possibility of redemption,” a sort of story and language which is “both near and far from Marx.” [397])

Argument

The argument for Ethical Marxism in a nutshell is that the creation of a ‘social society’ has to issue both from a political-economic analysis and a moral recognition of what is morally wrong about the antisocial form of society. (179)

This is one of Martin’s most succinct statements of what he aims to show (it’s not actually an argument). In the process of attempting to show this, the principal argument of the book is that Marxism has not and cannot in itself generate the ought which is necessary for a process which is truly revolutionary and emancipatory, and that Marxism’s attempted theorization of a revolutionary imperative in terms of interests is radically insufficient and must be supplemented by a separately-based ethical imperative.

Obviously this depends on the supposition that Marxism posits a purely interest-based motivation and imperative for revolution. We’ll return to this important question, which is related to Martin’s conception of a Marxism which positions itself as a positivistic science. But first let’s look at how the argument of Ethical Marxism develops.

At one point Martin lays it out along the following lines:

The most pressing ethical concern is the hardest thing not only to accomplish, but even to thematize, even to begin to get people to grapple with….Certainly there are ways in which power and ‘things’ work, and…even while these workings have to be studied and understood and grappled with from a strategic perspective, it is precisely the reduction to causal ‘thingness’ that is the essence of economism, or, to put the point the other way around, it is the complete setting aside of any consideration of the thing that ought to be done in some matrix of pure causality and interest that is the essence of economism. Lenin saw this, in his critique of economism, and yet, out of the orthodox Marxist refusal of the ethical, did not thematize the point this way….This refusal has had consequences, indeed dire consequences [and] overcoming this limitation is absolutely essential for any future Marxist project. (189)

(The “dire consequences” here would seem to refer to events in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s ascendancy, and indeed Martin later points to the Stalin period as “probably the main reason why there has to be a way of articulating the ethical with Marxism – or else it would probably be better not to have Marxism any more.” [302])1

Martin’s analysis is that Marxism, conceived simply as a science which describes and explains the dynamics of capitalism and projects an historical sequence, offers at best the sort of interest-based politics which follows from its explanation of history in terms of class struggle, and that such a politics will be equivalent to a realpolitik power-politics and can easily (or perhaps is bound to) issue in the perversions of the revolutionary process seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin. For Marx, he holds, “it is only a happy by-product that socialism and ultimately communism would be good for humanity…; instead, these social forms are inevitable… these forms are simply what will occur in the objective unfolding of the material dialectic of history.” (392)

Just the realization that more is needed, or the merely implicit exemplification of this realization (as seen, Martin believes, in the example of Lenin’s polemic against economism in What Is To Be Done) – this is quite insufficient. The only remedy is the explicit “thematization of the ethical” and the bringing of the ethical into politics, for “…a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

Materialism

One concern in pursuing this thesis (which takes Martin in many directions) is to maintain a philosophically materialist outlook:

The aspect of the struggle to overcome capitalism that has to do with justice and the aim of creating a good society remains subordinate and epiphenomenal [in Marx]. My argument in this book is that, if there are not at least key moments when these terms are not explicitly thematized and pursued in their own right, then this struggle cannot be carried through. The question remains how this thematization and motivation can be understood within an historical materialist framework, but my hope is that it can…. (155)

Obviously the concern here – what Martin at times calls “the ethico-ontological problem” (220), is to ground ethics immanently, that is, in this world, as opposed to an other, transcendent, world. Martin, it seems clear, wants to remain on the materialist ground of Marxism; but he wants to expand the meaning of that materialism. But although this is clearly his desire, it can’t be said that he is able to resolve the ethico-ontological problem, how to explain the genesis and status of the ethical within a general materialist ontological framework. At best he expresses a hope (as above), or points to a need, as in the following passage:

…there ought to be an argument for the material role that the ethical, and the discourse of the good, needs to play in creating a good society. In other words, if economics, politics and history cannot do what they were supposed to do, then we had better consider the materiality of the ethical – which means grappling with the materiality of evil. (48)

He does, though, point to indications that there must be some sort of materiality of the ethical, or indications that he thinks imply this. He points to what he believes to be gaps, gaps which can only be bridged by the ethical: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps” (49), and “…there are gaps in Marx’s analysis that can only be addressed in irreducibly normative terms” (103).

Gaps

Over the course of the book, Martin describes several gaps of different character, in each case only bridgeable, he believes, by the ethical. These gaps could be grouped under the following headings:

Most obviously, there is the gap between description and prescription, the gap between description/explanation and normative prescription which is demonstrated, he says, by “the irreducibility of vocabularies (the causal and the value-driven)” (403).

This is clearly the underlying thread of the book: that no amount or depth of description and explanation of the workings and dynamics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Marx and Marxism gives us, will generate the sort of moral imperative, the “ought,” which is necessary both to overthrow this system and to go beyond a “reaction formation” to build a genuinely different society. Further, that this gap is made larger and more pressing by the phenomena of colonialism, and in the 20^th century (and the 21^st) by imperialism. (See 102 – 155 or so, within the section of the book on “Imperialism as the Ethical Problem of Our Time”; “reaction formation” is introduced on 121.)

There is also the gap between necessity and possibility, between what must happen and what may potentially be brought into existence. This is the argument that historical necessity would obviate human freedom and particularity. But, given that the necessity of Marx’s historical template is questionable today in any case, we face the question (present in any case but brought home by the failure of Marxist inevitabilism) of how to understand the generation and actualization of possibilities. (At one point Martin describes his aim as “a ‘postinevitablist’ Marxism that is reconfigured in terms of ethical themes” – 191.) Such an understanding, he believes, must centrally involve the ethical.

His argument runs along the following lines:

Such a scheme presented as inevitability is either theology or strategic audacity; it is only in such a scheme presented as possibility, however, that the history and possible future of humanity actually matters….We are back into the problem of theodicy…in which case ‘redemption’ is not really redemption, this life is not a ‘real fight’ (James), there are no actual people who actually matter involved in history, but only the god of historical inevitability…. (158)

Rather than laws necessarily generating certain results, the laws of history “ought to be understood instead as ‘laws of possibility’, ways of theorizing where the openings might occur in the existing society that would allow for something different and better to arise,” thus introducing “an irreducible element of normativity.” (160, 268)

In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

The question of vision is also conceived by Martin as invoking “the religious dimension.” and it’s worth pausing a moment to ask how he conceives the relation of ethical and religious. At one point he speaks of a confidence that is needed which “holds central faith in the principles that exploitation, domination, and oppression are wrong, that we are ethically compelled to struggle against every form that these things take, and that another world is possible.” (409) He believes such a confidence is not only ethical but also religious in the sense that it is a faith both in these ethical principles and in the possibility of a different world.

The “vision thing” also brings us to the gap between destruction and construction. Revolutions involve both, but there is a danger of a construction which is merely a “reaction-formation,” a new which will not be qualitatively different or better because it is simply built through a negation of or reaction to the old. Only ethics, once again, can bridge the gap between revolutionary negation and destruction, and the vision of a redeemed future (a vision whose source he finds in “the religious dimension” of human existence).

The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (380)

Now these gaps are supposed to show, not only the necessity of the ethical, but to imply its materiality (see above). The argument for this would be along the following lines (this is strongly implied, I think, in Martin’s account, although not quite stated as suchⁱⁱ): If there are lacunae and gaps in Marx’s schema of explanation and projection, such that the gaps can only be bridged normatively, then (a) there is a need for the normative in order to make Marx’s account complete or coherent, and (b) if Marx’s account is overall materialist, then whatever it takes to fill these gaps must have some material status.

Presuming that I’ve correctly captured Martin’s argument, it’s a troublesome one logically, and I don’t think it really goes through very well. For one thing, although it’s asserted that this is so, it is never really demonstrated that only the ethical or normative can bridge these gaps. Why cannot there be some other way of filling these gaps? (In fact I believe there are other ways, as I’ll try to indicate below.)

Even more bothersome from a logical point of view is the status of (b): from the fact that there are gaps in a materialist account, it’s hard to see why it would necessarily follow that whatever is needed to fill the gaps must also be material. Take, as a rather highly charged parallel, the anti-evolutionist argument that there are irreducible gaps in the Darwinist (materialist) theory of evolution, which can only be bridged by a divine creative force. Suppose we granted that argument, would it follow that this “divine force” is therefore material? Of course the creationists and others who put this forward believe, on the contrary, that the “argument from gaps” shows the incompleteness of a materialist explanation, which must therefore be supplemented by an independent spiritual reality. But if materialism is ones axiomatic basis then presumably the argument would simply mean that the “divine force” is actually material: if there is an explanatory gap in a theory, then the presumption would be that whatever is necessary to bridge that gap will have a material status. But if materialism is already presupposed, it’s hard to see how the “argument from gaps” can be an argument for the materiality of ethics.

Sometimes Martin takes a different tack, which, at least as I see it, is more promising as a way of finding a basis for an ethics in human social materiality. Proposing “flourishment” as a translation of the Greek eudaimonia (an important term in Aristotle’s ethical discussions), Martin says that “even if flourishment might be understood in different ways in different times or places, or even if it is barely understood at all, we humans are good at recognizing what is not flourishment, and in knowing we need something else,” and that even if this sense may be little more than a bare feeling or reaction, “it is from this feeling that normative social theory develops.” (59) The overall human project, in which human good is based, would then be “to create possibilities for human flourishment.” (64: he calls it “the Aristotelian answer,” but it seems clear, at least during these pages, that it is also Martin’s answer.) Although these ideals of flourishment would differ historically, the notion would provide a common (formal) criterion of the good, with evil occurring “when possibilities for flourishment are cut off through the efforts of some human agency….” (63)

This seems, as I say, more promising, both with regard to the material rooting of morality and as a conception which can be integrated with Marxism, or which it might be argued is something presupposed by Marx. But although this line of thought is taken up by Martin over the course of ten pages or so at one point, it is not pursued systematically in the book.

II

In some sense Ethical Marxism is a long meditation on the crying need for liberation from the brutalities and morass of today’s world, but also the need to surpass Marxism-as-it-has-been. Indeed, Martin’s point is that these needs are crucially interrelated and that fulfillment of the former depends upon accomplishment of the latter. I think this is true and important – in fact I could not agree more. But when we come to the question of how we are to surpass the now-dead Marxism of our fathers, we have some differences. Most basically, I do not believe that the most essential thing, in order for Marxism to become an emancipatory theoretical structure, is that it be reoriented around “the ethical moment” as its basis. I believe that an ethics is founded upon the revolutionary project, rather than founding it, as Martin argues. Rather than morality being the core or foundation of a truly revolutionary politics, as Martin argues, I believe that the political is more basic, and that ethics finds its foundation within larger human projects, including that of an emancipatory politics. Obviously this is a basic point, and thrashing it out (or at least indicating a direction of argument) is one basic aim of the remainder of this paper.

There are also some matters of detail relating to Ethical Marxism which have their own importance, and which will also consume much of the space in what lies below. My concern is with several characteristic ways of arguing and framing things that Martin makes use of, which I believe are unfruitful or worse, and will not take us very far in terms of the discussion we need to be having. (These will be the subject of Part III of this essay.)

The movement from Is to Ought

Martin often tends to pose issues in terms of dichotomies (science/ethics, interest-based vs. ethical motivation, etc.); one of the most pervasive and basic in his thinking is the contradiction he proposes between a politics based on what at one point he calls “real ethics,” and a politics based “mere utilitarianism and calculation based on interests.” (211-12) Now one could question the adequacy of this and others of the dichotomous contrasts Martin sets up (and I’ll touch on this below), but for the moment I want to explore some of the tensions and problems that arise in Martin’s argument from it.

I’ll start from the following passage:

In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests. Interests are experienced differently in different strata of society…; for there to be a larger change in society, however, there has to be a more general crisis, indeed a crisis felt by all sectors of society. In Lenin’s memorable description, the crisis has to be such that people cannot any longer live in the ways in which they have been living, and the ruling class cannot any longer rule in the ways in which it has been ruling. The Marxist perspective is that, short of an actual deep crisis in the social system, people do not (again – generally, broadly, deeply) go into motion against the existing order. People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order. (187)

On the one hand it seems that Martin accepts that this is the case. Although he does not say so directly, contextual indications are that Martin believes this to be so – that people generally do not go up against the established order in ordinary circumstances (in “times of ‘normal functioning’,” as he puts it), even though it is an unjust order. (And how would it be possible not to believe this? It seems quite clear that it’s the case.)

On the other hand, at several points throughout the book Martin advances the thesis that without ethical/moral motivation and intention, a better world cannot come to be: that moral motivation is necessary to a revolution which is not merely a ‘reaction formation’. And as noted above, Martin believes that “…the Kantian thesis is right: a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

So it almost seems that Martin has, on the one hand, set up a problem which he believes must be solved, in order for any revolution to be truly a step in the actual liberation of humanity: The revolution must be made out of a moral motivation. But at the same time he also seems to believe that this is not (is never?) the case: “People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order.” So he has set a problem for any revolution, it seems, which must be solved but which has not been solved and perhaps cannot be solved.

I do not mean to give an argument simply based on this contradiction of phrases. But I do want to ask what it indicates. It is very much as if Martin’s position is that although people broadly do not make revolution out of moral motivation, they ought to do so. Clearly this reproduces the is/ought gap at a higher level (the meta-level): why should we be moral? But when it is posed this way it is clear, I think, that Martin does not provide a way of bridging this gap.

Why should we be moral?

Martin proposes that, in addition to the Marxist description of the structure of the present world, only ethics can bridge the gap between the wretched present and what he sometimes calls the “redeemed world” of a possible future. Suppose we accept that ethics can perform this function. There would still remain the problem of: why take up this ethical stance? Ethics can’t itself provide the reason, or the motive, to be ethical, or to take the ethical bridge to the future. We might answer that it’s necessary to begin from “the ethical moment” because that’s the only way to reach “the redeemed world.” But that would presuppose that we already have the impetus toward that redeemed world – yet it was precisely this impetus which ethics was supposed to be necessary in order to provide in the first place.

I don’t want to seem unnecessarily paradoxical or logic-chopping here. The problem that Martin runs into, as I see it, can be described more simply from another angle. He has written a book which is addressed, in the main, to Marxists and to those who believe in the great desirability or necessity of gaining or moving toward the “redeemed future.” And he is arguing that Marxism does not provide the resources for reaching this possible future, but that a revamped theory, with ethics at its core, an Ethical Marxism, is necessary if such a future is to be reached. Martin believes, moreover, that moral feeling is the actual basis of people’s entering into revolutionary practice or oppositional political engagement in the first place, and his claim is that this “ethical moment” has not been theorized, and must be. (That, at least, is one of the lines of thinking in this book.) In this context the “why be moral?” question does not arise, given the assumption that those addressed already operate, in their basic political outlook, from a moral motivation.

But Martin also believes that, not only must this moral basis be realized and made explicit within the consciously revolutionary ranks, but it must also form the basis, very broadly among the people, in a mass revolutionary upsurge. “Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” (155)

I think it actually is true that a problem has been set which cannot be solved within the terms in which it is posed. But perhaps the quandary stems from these terms as they are understood in Ethical Marxism. I want to pursue this thought by exploring briefly some of the central concepts or markers which Martin deploys – ethics/morality – politics – Marxism and Marx’s thinking – all of which I believe should be understood or taken (along with their interrelations) differently than he does.

Ethics and politics

This is a large and important topic, in my view, and there’s far more to be said about it than I can possibly say here, or that I’m capable of saying generally. This should be a topic of discussion among all who work for human liberation, or want to. But I think I can say enough to make clear why I believe that Martin’s approach to the question will not lead very far.

Let’s begin from the following passage in Ethical Marxism:

Yes, the new society has to be against the ancien regime, but even more it has to be for the future and future possibilities…. It could be said that the dialectic of negativity is essential, but it is also in danger of becoming purely reactive without the notion of an underdetermined, redeemed future…. The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (379-80)

Let us accept (as I do) that we need both of these dialectics, as Martin describes them, that we will be lost unless the necessary negation is interwoven with a striving toward the open redeemed future. The question is whether ethics is necessary to provide a link or bridge between the two, and whether ethics is adequate or sufficient to link them. (The question is not, it should be clear, whether “Marxism is ready, in a new synthesis, to accept that ethical questions are real questions” [256]; to deny that ethics is necessary for the “bridging” function is not to deny that ethical questions are real.)

Early in the book Martin talks about “the call of the future,” which he links with the concern expressed by Kant for “the most distant future generations,” and which he characterizes as an ethical demand. “In some sense,” he goes on to say, “my only argument in this book is the concern itself is the ground of the ‘science’, of systematic theorizing. That is the essence of Ethical Marxism.” (27)

Here the ethical demand embodied in a concern for the future is seen as both motive-force and ground for the sort of theorizing that Marx gave us. Sometimes this “call of the future” is characterized in terms of vision. In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

Unless this sort of ethically-motivated vision motivates and frames the intentions of those who are involved in making a new future, Martin believes, a “redeemed future” will not come about. (“Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” – 155)

Ethics-based vs. interest-based?

It’s true, I think, that without a vision of the future, no popular uprising or revolutionary upsurge will change the social fundamentals of class society. Both a vision of communism (in a general way) and the conviction that it is possible are necessary to a coming about of a communist future. But why must this vision be founded, independently from the social and historical process, and even independently of a communist political project, in an ethics or morality? Martin’s predominant line of thinking, as I understand it, is that this sort of independent ethical basis is necessary if a would-be revolutionary politics is not to become an interest-based realpolitik. But his argument for it crucially depends on a series of dichotomous bifurcations: fact/value, history/morality, interest-based and ethically-based actions (as well as on a strictly Kantian-derived definition of the ethical), as in the following passages:

Either I take the core of moral theory to be the treatment of the other as an end-in-herself or -himself, or I simply take it as realpolitik that I find myself in the midst of a war of all against all…. (69)

It can…be argued that, without an “ethical grounding”…, “politics” can only mean a set of tactical considerations concerning the machinations and mechanisms of power, and not a “thinking of the polis,” particularly a thinking of the just polis…. (391)

The hold of these sorts of bifurcations on Martin’s thinking can be seen in his claim that Lenin’s internationalism should be seen as ethically-based. Why? Because “it goes against the grain of the existing society, and it does this on the basis of principle,” a principle “not based on a narrow conception of interest.” (164)

Do these alternative bases for a politics, interest-based and ethically-based, exhaust the field? To see how this may not be the case (and I don’t think it is), I want to look at a couple of observations by Mao Zedong, whom Martin characterizes as having “restitched” the ethical into Marxism. (391).

Mao said, speaking of his youth, “First we were revolutionaries, and as a result we became Marxists.” That captures very well what I am trying to capture with the idea of Ethical Marxism: first we see that there is something very wrong about the way that society is set up, and as a result we look for a systematic understanding of society that will allow us to move forward and try to make things right.”\ (340-41)

Martin takes it that becoming a revolutionary, that is, one who becomes dedicated to the systematic restructuring of social relations, must be based upon a primary insight which is ethical in character, and which provides guidance in the enterprise and a linkage to the “redeemed future” in this intial insight that “something is very wrong.”

There are a couple of things to be said initially about this schema. First, note how this passage brings out again the dual function which Martin depends upon the ethical to perform: both beginning and bridge, providing both the initial impetus which brings the actor into revolutionary practice, and the linkage to the redeemed future (the vision of which is to be provided by the basically untheorized religious dimension).

At the same time, it is clear here why Martin needs the “bridging” function. For there is no reason why an initial perception that “something is very wrong” will not go in a sort of revenge direction, or toward what Martin calls a reaction-formation. But if this is true, what justifies calling the initial perception ethical? We seem to be in the same position, whether we say that the initial impetus to revolutionary politics is ethical insight or an interest-based motivation. In either case we need (on Martin’s set-up) a more fully-fledged ethics to act as “bridge.”

The role of practice

We seem to be consistently drawn into conceptual and logical tangles as we trace the implications of what’s said in Ethical Marxism. I think this should be taken as a marker of some basic inconsistencies or jumbles in the theory advanced in this book. I hope to point to some possibilities in the way of emerging from this thicket. I want to proceed by way of one more quotation, both from Martin and from Mao.

…many of [Mao’s] popular formulations have a distinctively “categorical imperative” ring to them – probably most of all the famous statement, “Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all come down to one thing: It is right to rebel against reactionaries.”  (194)

Let’s start from a fuller quotation of Mao’s famous statement in its original context:

The immense complexity of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: ‘It is justifiable to rebel’ For centuries people have been saying: ‘It is justifiable to oppress or to exploit people, but it is wrong to rebel’. Marxism turned this thesis upside down. That is a great contribution, a thesis established by Marx from the struggle of the proletariat. Basing their action on this thesis, people have shown defiance, struggled, and worked for socialism.³

In making an interpretation here, a lot turns on a question of priority. Should the Marxism put forward by Mao in this passage be understood as beginning from a primordial ethical judgment (rebellion is right, justified)? Or should rebellion be seen as the primary action, generating a for-or-against field, with Marxism beginning from affirmation of the rebellion, putting oneself on the side of those who rebel? In the latter case, which I’d argue for, the justifiability is not an abstract (or an a priori) judgment, but a practical one which is simultaneous with ranging oneself with those who rebel.

Putting this together with the “first revolutionaries, then Marxists” statement, we can see how (as I see it) the basic movement is from rebel or revolutionary practice to Marxism as the affirmation and comprehension of that practice within a larger, deeper context, and then movement forward from there. This primacy of practice is essential for Mao, as for Marx and a revolutionary Marxism. Ethics in this conception is formed upon and around a basic practical orientation. (The movement here is similar to Badiou’s sequence of event, subject and truth-process, where it is the recognition of the event which founds both subject and truth-process, with an ethics following out of this nexus.⁴)

What is primary is the movement in the world, practice, and it’s this which generates the need which is not only what has led, historically, to taking up Marx, but which is also necessary in order to come at Marx in such a way as to see his theory as an understanding of the present which shows a different future as possible. At that point, in coming to grips with the revolutionary political vista thus opened up, there are many problems to be solved, including ethically. None of this movement from practice to theory guarantees anything, of course, and certainly not a good or fruitful understanding of Marx. The point is not a sure-fire method of getting everything right, but a conceptual relationship and construal of what’s going on.

The point in all this is not, of course, justification through quotations from Mao or l’explication du texte. But it is significant that these statements can (and I think should) be understood differently than they are taken by Martin.

But as well, I do believe that something along the lines of the above is how we need to understand the relation, not only between ethics and Marxism, but ethics and an emancipatory politics, and between each of these and a primary social stirring in the world.

Let us sketch the differences by way of a few questions. Are we, principally, Marxists because we are revolutionaries, or revolutionaries because we are Marxists? I think it is clear that the primacy must go to the first: Marxists because revolutionaries.  But how about the question with a closer relevance to Martin’s argument: Are we revolutionaries due to our ethical principles (ethical stance, an ethical insight or vision), or is there an ethics which crucially follows upon the taking up of the revolutionary project, which stems from an emancipatory political project? I believe the latter is true.  And finally, is politics an autonomous field of human social practice (or of truth-processes, as Badiou argues), or does it require to be founded upon a religio-ethical vision, as Martin believes? Here my own answer is less certain (I am not sure whether, or to what extent, the political field should be seen as autonomous), but I would not see it as needing to be founded in ethics or religious vision.

Thus I am arguing that both our taking up Marxism (and the sort of Marxism we take up), and our ethics (and the character of this ethics) follow upon and stem from our primary step in practice, which must be understood politically. There is no automaticity here, that is, it is not the case that anyone who takes up a revolutionary project thereby takes it up in the best way or draws the right conclusions. There is plenty of scope, and necessity, for thinking, argument, and investigation. And the whole matter is far more complex than the schemata I’ve offered might seem to indicate. On the one hand there are many ways and even degrees of “being a revolutionary”; and on the other, there are many types and aspects of ethics, for ethics are associated with overarching projects (understood in the Sartrean manner), and there is more than one project in any human life.

Without going into these complications, though, I hope to have said enough to indicate a different way of coming at the questions of ethics, politics, and Marxism.

III

In this final section I want to work through a number of topics, including the adequacy of Martin’s take on Marx’s thought, and some characteristic moves and modes of thinking in Ethical Marxism. I will be critical here, because I think these are matters that are important to get right.

Marx

Let’s go back to the opening sentence of a passage quoted above: “In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests.” This doesn’t ring true, to my ears. Where does Marx talk about what leads or motivates people to question their circumstances broadly/deeply? And when does he talk about motivation on a broad scale by “material interests”? This is quite alien, it seems to me, to the way in which Marx approaches the question, and his conception of the relation between human activity and the materiality of their circumstances. He says, for example, in a wellknown passage, that history only poses problems for which there are solutions (“mankind…sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”) meaning that problems are revelatory of social contradictions which contain their own supercession, that solutions are immanent within the problems themselves. Now whether we believe that this Hegelian-derived view of history and social contradictions is on the right track or not, the relation of materiality to human practice and its possibilities is very different from the view that it is only material interests which motivate people, which I believe is really a mischaracterization of Marx.

This is an example of a view and portrayal of Marx in this book which is rather remote from the thinking of Karl Marx, to my understanding. Now I do not hold that our problems as revolutionaries would be solved or solvable if we just understood Marx or Marxism correctly. Far from it. On the other hand, it is of high importance from the standpoint of the emancipatory project to understand Marx aright, and it often looks to me that Martin does not.

A basic aspect of Martin’s delineation of Marx with which I take strong issue is his characterization of Marx as a positivist, as in the following passages.

As with the positivists, for Marx a ‘scientific’ theory of society and history would be purely descriptive, not normative…. Marx aimed to be scientific, not normative. It might even be said that Marx aimed to be scientific as opposed to normative. (34, 103)

Marx aimed to add the processes of human social and cultural development to a universal science of all material processes. The algorithms that represent (or govern) material processes that occur in different domains of the material world (the different fields of scientific investigation) are themselves related through algorithms: this is reductionism…. (411)

An algorithm is a process which will always produce the same result of a certain sort whenever it runs. (The easiest example is a set of rules for solving a problem which will invariably give the correct answer if followed precisely. Thus the process of solving a problem in long division which we all learned in grade school is an algorithm: you have simply to follow the sequence of rules, and the correct answer will be generated.) Martin represents Marx as believing that history works through an algorithmic process, and that he had discovered the algorithm of history (that is, the invariable rules governing the process, such that a certain outcome is predictable). (411, 429, 432, 479)

This is coupled (as it would have to be) with a portrayal of Marx’s view of historical processes as completely deterministic, so that the general future course of things would be determined with a great degree of inevitability. Thus Marx is described by Martin as simply talking “about the way the capitalist system works and that this systemic working would lead to things working out by and by [that is, leading to communism].” (104)

Is this Marx?

Is this a fair account of Marx’s thinking, or of Marxism? Yes, perhaps of some forms of Marxism, often dominant ones; but no, not of Marx’s thinking, and not of all Marxisms. On the one hand the sort of positivistic, utilitarian and even Hobbesian Marxism which is the object of Martin’s critique has certainly been a strand, even a prominent strand (especially within “actually existing” socialisms). But there is far more to Marx (and to the more vibrant strands of Marxism) than this, and some of Martin’s characterizations border on caricature.

So I think there is a basic inaccuracy here, a great deal of one-sidedness and misunderstanding of Marx. I’ll reiterate that Marx’s being right or wrong is in itself of not much moment. The importance of the question lies in the context of developing an adequate revolutionary thinking and theory. What is crucial is whether we have a theory or theories adequate to comprehend and bear fruit in the process of human liberation and the transformation of our social being. But then, Marx’s usefulness to this great enterprise will depend on what his thinking is, so let’s pursue that question for a moment. And here we need to make some basic distinctions.

First, there’s a differentiation to be made between the explicit statements of a theoretical program and historical schema which Marx sometimes makes (that in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy being the most obvious and wellknown⁵), and the actual theoretical and historical work which he carries out. Thus while of course Marx does make several grand programmatic announcements, many have noted that when it comes to concrete historical studies (notably The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France), although he is certainly understanding historical events from within the theoretical framework he has developed, he does not reason from a schema, but through (in Lenin’s phrase) a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, which in turn represent complications in, and often problems for, his general program.

It’s really impossible to see how this procedure, which is entirely characteristic of Marx (including in Capital), is accurately captured by either description, or algorithm, or positivistic notions of science. These do not describe what “science” is for Marx, and they are very far from capturing the analyses that Marx actually carried out.

The adequacy of this sort of conception of Marx’s thinking is made even more implausible when we take into consideration the various phases of his thought. Marx, in company with most great thinkers, goes through several discernible stages in his thought. Everyone is familiar with the distinction between early and mature Marx (the 1844 MS, on the one hand, and Capital on the other, say). But there are differences here too; for example The German Ideology, usually cited as if it were an instance of Marx’s later thinking, expresses a rather crude and somewhat positivistic programmatic standpoint, which is almost completely absent from Capital. (Martin at one point says that Marx has an affinity with John Stuart Mill on the basis that “both claimed that their work could proceed on a ‘purely empirical basis’,” [362-3] drawing these words from The German Ideology but also claiming that Marx repeats the claim elsewhere, which I do not believe is the case (at least not in works later than German Ideology).⁶)

It is true that while the theory and program of Capital are certainly not positivistic, there is an expression in several places of a rather deterministic historical scheme. But this too becomes no longer characteristic given the changes that occur in Marx’s thinking in the 1870s, as he came to grips with the three phenomena of the Paris Commune; the growth of the workers’ movement in Germany and its associated Marxism (of which Marx was very critical); and the increasing study of Marx in radical Russian circles, and the questions raised for the application of Marx’s schema in this situation. All of these raised questions as to the projections which could be drawn from Capital (not to mention the earlier programmatic statements of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), and Marx’s responses to these newly arisen occasions (Class Struggles in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme, and his reply – and its various drafts – to Vera Zasulich) sketch a much more open and undeterministic stance and theory than is to be found earlier. (Martin does mention the correspondence with Zasulich [275-77], but only to criticize Marx’s failure to raise “the question of place.”)

There is far more that could be said in relation to this question – about the explanatory structure underlying Capital (which bears no relation to a descriptive positivistic idea of science), about Marx’s explanations of contemporary history, etc., and quite a bit has been written on these topics – but what I’ve said is probably enough to make my point.

Reverse implication to origins

Continuing for a moment the discussion of Martin’s picture of the figure of Karl Marx and his thinking, let me cite what I find to be some quite astonishing statements:

One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that Marx by himself is not so interesting or exciting…. (360)

For Stalin, but perhaps even for Marx, Engels, and Lenin, intellectual ferment was not a good thing. (352)

…for Marx, all you need to know about agriculture is that it represents an outmoded form of production. (274)

I term these statements astonishing in that I find it difficult to believe that these judgments, peppered through the book on a diverse array of subjects, could come from a straightforward reading of Marx and an attempt to understand his thinking. Perhaps we simply differ in what we find in Marx. But my guess is that glosses on Marx like these arise from a bent towards reading Marx through the history of Marxism, and in particular reading Marx (and Engels and Lenin) through Stalin – or rather, through a fear of Stalinism. This becomes clear, I think, in a passage like that on 189-90, where Martin argues for a strong link between “Marxism’s resistance to the ethical ‘as such’, and Marxism’s tendency, an inherent tendency I would argue, toward economism.” This passage continues,

Indeed,…the difficulty is that Marxism (or simply the thought of Karl Marx, to be direct about this) entails a critique of reification, and yet Marxism, especially when it becomes only a structural “science” of the causality of things and interests…seems itself to reify. In practice, especially in the practice of Stalin in the Soviet Union, but not only there, this orientation has had, again, dire consequences. (190)

This reasoning, along the lines of holding that the seeds of Stalin were planted by Marx, is an example of an all-too-common mode of argument in Ethical Marxism, one of “reverse implication” from the characteristics of a phenomenon back to the attribution of those characteristics to its origins.

The sort of move I mean is exemplified in some of Martin’s arguments concerning human meat consumption, as well as with reference to 20^th century or contemporary imperialism, where he will begin by pointing to modern industrial meat production, or to imperialism. Having taken it as clear that this is obviously wrong (“the immense cruelty done to animals in the current food-production system and through human participation on that system is a great wrong that calls us to ethical action” [213], for example), he will generalize or hypostasize the basis in either case: carnivorism as the basis of industrial food production, or commodity-production as the basis of capitalist imperialism. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that, given that the final form (industrial food production, imperialism) is clearly wrong or evil, this basis must be ethically wrong.

The argumentative move, in other words, begins from the wrongness (evil) of a phenomenon, X; the basis of X is then generalized; this generalized or hypostasized basis (carnivorism, commodity production) is then projected back to a beginning or seed of X, which is then itself presumed to be wrong or evil.

This beginning is often characterized by Martin as the crossing of a boundary or threshold by human beings, a step that brought them into the territory of evil. If this sounds a lot like myths of the fall of man and the original sin, he has no problem with such similarities: “My own view…is that myths of a human fall point to a time when humans first began to eat inhuman animals on a regular basis.” (87) And “the fall into alienation is the emergence of the commodity form and the process of commodification” (266). On a different subject: “a threshold had to be crossed which allowed one half of a population (male) to understand the other half of the population (female) as objects of domination.” (236)

To draw this out a little more: The argument is that commodity-production, with its concomitant reduction (Martin believes) of everything to a “mere thing,” marks the threshold after which “all bets are off” ethically: “If you will do this, what will you not do? If you will cross this line, what line will you not cross?” (245)

There is a similar line of reasoning in relation to the animal question, and in this case Martin holds that the step into carnivorism was also the threshold of commodity production as well:

At some point in this transition, there must have been a moment when a fundamental distinction between animals and humans began to be made, as regards cruelty and some sort of basic standing in the world, and here we can see the roots of reification…. We can see the beginnings of commodity production. (260)

The projection backward presumes, for its argumentative legitimacy, a causal process leading from this threshold beginning to the present form. And Martin clearly believes this to be the case:

The first forms of commodity production initiate humanity into a world of things. The emergence of capitalism places the reification of humanity on a purely calculative basis, and from there all human relationships are brought under the brutal cash nexus. (250)

Bad reasoning

There are many aspects of this form of reasoning which are both untenable and disturbing. It is also, we should note parenthetically, not very congruent with Martin’s opposition to “inevitablism.” For here he appears to presuppose a deterministic unfolding from that beginning point, indeed a sort of teleological determinism – the end (industrial meat production, imperialism) is presumed to be in the beginning (the “fall” into carnivorism, commodity-production).

The form of Martin’s reasoning here also has a disturbingly close similarity to that which is often used by opponents of abortion, who project backward, beginning from the wrongness of killing a person, to the threshold whose crossing results in a complete human being (the moment of conception is the obvious line-crossing boundary), and conclude that wrongness can also be imputed to any deliberate ending of life following the crossing of that threshold.

And in fact the form of reasoning employed in this sort of reverse implication to origins (as I’m terming it), has nothing to recommend it.

It certainly does not generally follow, from the fact that a certain characteristic is true of the end result of a process, that the same characteristic can be attributed to the origin or beginning of that process. If this were the case, then the properties of a fully grown oak tree would be true of the acorn which was its seed — a very unsound inference. To reason in this way is to ignore real changes which occur in the development of any phenomenon, and the emergence of new and unique characteristics at new levels of development.

In Ethical Marxism, the idea of a threshold, a fall, the original evil of commodity production and an increasing evil with capitalism, involves a great deal of romanticization of pre-capitalist societies (see 102, 130, 149). Agricultural society “keeps people sane,” Martin says, while industrialization and mechanization “destroys human sanity” (55)

The ‘cell-form’ in Marx

The idea of a boundary or threshold is also related by Martin to another concept, that of the “cell-form” of a phenomenon, drawing this term from Marx:

The cell-form of a world that is upside-down is the commodity.…we might draw a line between [that is, connecting] the present functioning of systems and the cell-form of which Marx wrote. (250, 256)

In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital (Vol. 1), Marx analogizes the role of the commodity in capitalism to that of the cell of an organism, and terms the commodity-form the “economic cell-form.” (This is his only use of the term, to my knowledge.) He makes this analogy by way of explaining both why he begins with analysis of the commodity-form (although “to the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae”) and why previous investigators have not done likewise (“because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body”).

Martin, however, identifies this term with his own idea of the seed from which the present system grows, and attributes this to Marx and Engels:

One could argue that, for both Marx and Engels, part of what it means for there to be a given social system is that there is a prefiguration of the present in a “cell-form,” and that this cell-form can be seen in a threshold that is crossed by humankind. (239)

He then goes on to identify the “cell-form,” not only with his notion of a threshold, but with the irremediable fall of humanity:

…there is with Marx’s conception of the “cell-form” the notion that the first forms of commodity production let the cat out of the bag and there is little or no chance of putting the cat back in the bag. …there was a conjuncture, in prehistory, where the seeds of patriarchy, private property, commodity production, and even the state…and eventually capitalism were planted, in a single go. (243, 239)

It should be clear that the uses Martin makes of it have nothing to do with Marx’s use of this phrase. Indeed, looking to the analogy drawn in this metaphor to the cells of an organism, it’s clear that the cells of an organism only exist within the context of the whole organism; likewise with the relation of the commodity to the “organism” of capitalist society, from which Marx’s analysis proceeds by abstraction. (Continuing the comparison to the analysis of organic cells, Marx says, “In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.”)

This point is important not chiefly because it represents a misreading of Marx, but principally for the light it sheds on the character of the difference between Marx (and Marxism) and the manner in which Martin proceeds and the theory which he builds. For Marx the commodity is reached and known through abstraction from the whole of capitalism, and this “cell-form” in turn serves as a means of understanding the working of the whole at the most basic level of analysis. It is out of the sort of understanding of the present illustrated here that Marx draws his historical remarks (the path to the present) and – most importantly – his vision of future possibilities.

For Marx, communism is an inherent possibility of the present configuration of human society, of its contradictory social dynamic; his analysis points to this possibility. Communism is not for Marx, as it is for Martin (often), an ethico-religious vision, derived in some sense prior to any social analysis. And for Marx, I would argue, the ethical judgment on (that is, against) capitalism derives from the reality of this possibility or possibilities, not from an absolutist and logically prior judgment of capitalism or commodity-production as evil.

Obviously to say that Marx’s thinking differs in this way from Martin’s is not to decide the issue, but the way in which it differs does complicate both the picture drawn of Marx in Ethical Marxism and the use to which Martin often wants to put Marx’s “science.” For if Marx is to be simply used instrumentally for the achievement of a prior ethical project, then what is used will not really be Marx. Further, if we read Marx in this way, many of the sharp dichotomies set up by Martin – between fact and value, history and morality, etc. — fall away, at least within the ambit of Marx’s thinking.

One more thing

On the very first page Martin gives his approval to the thesis (pioneered in a neo-Aristotelean vein by G.E.M. Anscombe) “that there are basic ethical questions about which nothing can be said, and that it would be a violation of ethics to presume to give an ‘explanation’ as to why it is wrong to do certain things…that the violation occurs even in the idea that certain situations might become questions, brought into the discursive realm.” (1) At several points in the book, Martin’s judgment concerning a phenomenon is a simple “it is evil” or “it is wrong” (see for example 27, 43, 44, 353), and at one point he describes his aim as being “to establish the place of evil in social theory.” (33)

There are several problems, as I see it, with this way of proceeding. Most obviously, this sort of thesis would seem to lend itself all too easily to the confirmation of parochial prejudices of a particular time, place, or culture. But more broadly, such a stance seems to pose itself, as a matter of principle, against investigation and discussion of certain issues, to say in effect, “This is obviously wrong; end of discussion.”

This is not to say that it’s  sometimes not be appropriate to make this sort of simple judgment (“it is wrong”); but this is a matter of context, not of principle. And what makes this principle particularly problematic in the circumstances of this book, is the way in which it can interrelate to the “reverse implication” method described above. For here the end-phenomenon, from which the “reverse implication” begins, is first made the subject of a categorical judgment. The beginning “cell form” or boundary point is then also supposed to be subject to the same judgment. (“This is evil.”) But if the initial judgment is not itself supposed to be liable to any further discussion, then the reverse-implication procedure becomes even more dangerous.

In conclusion

To recapitulate the general thesis of Ethical Marxism in a very simplified form (and which I hope is not a caricature), Martin’s stance is that a moral impulse is needed as the beginning point of the revolutionary project, and that a more fully developed ethics is needed as both continuing impetus and guide toward a possible future “redeemed world,” the vision of which stems from “the religious perspective.” The role of Marxism is to provide a description of the lineaments of the present and to help map out the means toward this future (means which must themselves be evaluated ethically). If this is a fair, albeit extremely bare-bones, account, then there is a strong similarity here to a very familiar picture of a dichotomy of fact and value, of description and prescription, in this case with Marxism describing the facts and ethics supplying the values. Such a bifurcation seriously under-represents the role of explanation, which is certainly not strictly factual or descriptive, and the ways in which all of these – describing, explaining, valuing – interrelate and interpenetrate as aspects (moments, if you will) of an overall process which Marx terms (human) practice.

In fact I think we have to begin at least from this point, from a picture of human life and social activity in which thinking, evaluating, projecting, theorizing, and acting are aspects of a continuous social process, in which all social life is understood as essentially practical, and “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice.” (Thesis 8)

This may seem too much like the “work from what exists in the world and everything will work out bye and bye” stance which Martin criticizes strongly in Marx. But where else can we begin than from the existing world, understood not in a flat, descriptive, positivistic way, but in its dynamic motion, self-cleavages, differentiating processes, and the idealizing and idea- and truth-processes which human practice (praxis) creates – and of course with no guarantee or promise that it will all work out?

If I end here on what is in a sense all-too-familiar ground — an evocation of praxis, and of a particular strain of Marxism⁷ – this is surely an indication of the limitations in my own attempts to rethink the revolutionary project. I certainly hold by the above sketch as a minimal orientation, but, as may be obvious, the critical examination of Ethical Marxism put forward here has not been carried out from the vantage point of any worked out solution to the problems which Martin has attempted to solve.

*******

This is a strong aspect of wandering, even meandering, in the development of themes and topics in Ethical Marxism, and the book’s order is generally associative and train-of-thought rather than by topic and development or logical deployment of argumentation. Themes are dropped and then picked up later but in a different key, arguments are left undeveloped, and emotive expression sometimes seems to overwhelm the cognitive development of content. As anyone knows who’s read his work, this is Martin’s style, and it has its strengths and its charms; but it’s not a style of writing and intellectual construction which make it easy to be certain that one has, in a paraphrase or account such as I’ve attempted, captured exactly what he intends. If I haven’t captured his meaning, though, I trust that others will set me right.

More importantly, the question at issue in this book and in my engagement with it, is the shape of the communist project in the present era. Bill Martin has been striving (here and in previous and subsequent writings) to explore and put forward a view of what that project must encompass. I’ve indicated the ways in which I think the approach he wants to take is seriously flawed. But I’m conscious, too, of how incomplete are my own views and how pressing is the necessity of collective work on this urgent political and intellectual and practical task.

Notes

Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3

“Understanding the Crisis Historically,” the opening session (and the one I attended), featured David Harvey, Duncan Foley, Beverly Silver, and Immanuel Wallerstein as speakers — a distinguished lineup, and one that divided neatly between Marxist (Harvey and Foley) and World Systems (Silver and Wallerstein) analysts. I’ll go through their talks from my notes, adding some comments and impressions as I go. I don’t claim to give a complete report of all that was said – for that, the 3CT promises a video of the proceedings in a couple of weeks – but merely some facets that I found of particular interest.

David Harvey: Moving the Crisis Around: from Economics to Politics and Back Again

Harvey’s talk – one of the best, I thought – did not contain much that would surprise readers of his recent Enigma of Capital (a book on which I hope to write something soon), although he did bring out some aspects of the developing crisis which have surfaced since he wrote that. Over the past year, for example, the crisis has lifted in some areas of the world – it is long gone in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Australia – while hanging on stubbornly in others: much of Europe and especially the US has seen deep and continuing job losses. (“In this country today,” he said, “it’s not even a jobless recovery, but joblessness creating recovery.”)

Latin America does well because of its connection as supplier to the Chinese economic locomotive. In the US and Britain, though, the crisis has moved from pure economic emergency to the plane of political choices, raising the question: Why the political choice of austerity in Britain and the US?

Given that virtually no economist believes that cutting state deficits is a route to either cutting unemployment or real economic growth in these core economies, it is a real question why this has emerged as the course of choice for ruling classes on both sides of the Atlantic over the past year. It’s a question we’ve raised here without being able to resolve it, and I was glad to see it brought to the fore by Harvey. To resume with what he said:

Capital has been on a long-term thrust to rid itself of social costs, and we can see how deficits have been used as a weapon to do this, all the way back to Reagan. Essentially the US is going through the standard neoliberal IMF program. We saw how Clinton in the US and Blair in Britain completed the neoliberal programs begun by Reagan and Thatcher, so here we have Obama and Cameron playing similar roles.

Compare the deficit-cutting austerity approach here with the way in which China has been dealing with the crisis: to some extent China is acting as the US did in the 2000s, and is building up a concomitant asset bubble, but wage levels have also been increasing by about 25%. The question here is how far (or smoothly) this sort of approach can go, because it also builds instabilities.

In the US the crisis has been resolved (for now) for capital. Profit rates are back up.

Individual capitals, or factions of capital, in their anarchic thrusts, cannot govern their own profit rates, and whereas their destructive tendencies are restrained by other classes politically, they do not have the power to do so on their own, nor to prevent their own après nous le déluge course.

In other words: If capital is to build an overall healthy capitalist economy, its own anarchic and destructive tendencies must be moderated and restrained by other classes. But neoliberalism, regnant now for three decades, has been all about breaking the independent power of other classes, especially of course the working class. In this situation, as we see at present, capital’s destructive après nous… mentality has nothing to limit and restrain it. Now, with profit rates restored, but with deep and continuing unemployment making robust growth and an overall healthy (capitalist) economy impossible, capital is unable to act on its own in any but a short-term maximize-profits manner.

Harvey’s political-strategic thinking in a sense follows from this analysis, or at least it seems that he believes it does. His thinking, politically, is that the first task is to make capitalism healthy, and then to go beyond it.

I imagine that many of us may have some different ideas here. It would be good if we could have some discussion, not only on this strategy (and, as we’ll see, Wallerstein also puts forward a variant of it), but also on his analysis.

Duncan Foley: The Political Economy of Post-Crisis Global Capitalism

Foley began by outlining his theory of two types of capitalist crisis: those whose mechanism is a falling rate of profit (characterized by rising wages and inflation), and those caused by a rising rate of exploitation (which are deflationary in character). Of the four great crises of the past 150 years, those of the 1890s and the 1970s were of the former type, while those of the 1930s and today are of the latter.

1970s stagflation was caused by class struggle about the upward pressure of wages. Globalization had the effect of stopping this upward pressure; this also meant that capitalist escape from the crisis of the 1970s was not effected by increasing the organic composition of capital.

Foley outlined what he termed four issues for the future: First, the unevenness of the present crisis. It is not, he holds (based on similar considerations as Harvey brought forward) a world crisis. (And the same was true in the 1930s.) Second is the question of the distribution of aggregate demand.

Third, there is the dollar dilemma. On the one hand the centrality of the dollar in the world economy, the fact that it functions as the world reserve currency, is a feature of US hegemony and allows this country to borrow from the rest of the world and run up deficits without end. But on the other, this also means that the US is the one country in the world which is powerless to control its own exchange rate.

And finally, there is the US hegemonic role itself. Is it possible for a world capitalist economy to function without a hegemonic power, as has always been the case? And whether this is so or not, how long can the US continue to play this role?

Beverley Silver: Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Labor: a Global View from the End of the American Century

Silver, in common with most other world systems theorists, sees systems operating or going through cycles over both the long durée and shorter term (100 years). The end of the 20^th century has brought the US-dominated cycle. The US decline began in the crisis of the 1970s,which she sees as caused by a profit squeeze, which subsequently became a continuing crisis of underconsumption. (For those who may be unfamiliar with the terminology, this Silver is referencing some standard Marxist explanations, and debates, on the origins of capitalist crises, and of the crisis of the 1970s in particular.)

The question now is: will there be the emergence of a new cycle of accumulation? Or are we on the eve of the emergence of a new system?

If we are to move beyond the present (and past) crises, we have to find a way of internalizing the costs of reproduction of both nature and of people, which capitalism has never done.

I have to admit my notes on Silver’s talk are scanty, but it’s also true that her talk was scattered and not well developed. My impression was that she has a more substantial theory in her head than she was able or ready to articulate here, perhaps due to insufficient preparation. At any rate, my notes reflect what I found most important, both here and in the case of the other speakers.

Immanuel Wallerstein: Structural Crisis in the World-System: Where Do We Go from Here?

Wallerstein, very clear and systematic as always, said that he would first lay out his general position or premises, and then go into the political questions.

His premises, as he put it, will be familiar to those who have read even some of his extensive writings. He spelled them out as follows.

1)      All systems have lives, going through the stages of birth, establishing equilibrium, loss of equilibrium, systemic crisis, and death. In these latter stages, a system reaches or points to a bifurcation: a chaotic state, with two possible ways of establishing a new equilibrium.

2)      Capitalism is a system of endless accumulation of capital. There is a need for the establishment of quasi-monopoly, with certain leading industries; this, however, is self-liquidating over time, and requires the support of the state. Accumulation goes through long waves, lasting 50-60 years. Within the interstate system there are successive periods of hegemony of particular states; this is also self-liquidating.

3)      Between 1945 and 1970 there was a large expansion of capitalism under US hegemony. From the 1970s until the present has been a period characterized by financialization, bubbles, and US hegemonic decline, which was accelerated during the Bush years. 1968 saw an eruption on a world scale, whose consequences have been the end of centrist liberalism; the end of the hegemony of the “old left” within the left; a vigorous and successful assertion of the right on a world scale; and, since the mid-1990s, the rise of an opposition to the rise of the right.

4)      A structural crisis is primarily characterized by chaos, which means the rapid fluctuation  of all parameters of the system. This makes prognosis very chancey. It is clear, though, that the capitalist world-system is (and has been) in the midst of a structural crisis, out of which will emerge (nondeterministically) a new system.

Moving to the political questions, Wallerstein first characterized the actors, as he has before, as “the spirit of Davos” and “the spirit of Porto Alegre,” symbolizing the two sides he sees shaping up, and the two alternatives of this bifurcation, by the names of the cities in which wellknown annual global gatherings have been held. (The World Economic Forum, a conference of the rich and powerful, has met yearly since 1971 in Davos, Switzerland, while the World Social Forum, a broad-based gathering of oppositional forces, began meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001.) It is, in short, the difference between those whose aim is to move toward another exploitative and hierarchical (but, according to Wallerstein, noncapitalist) system, and those who want to create a system not seen hitherto, which would be egalitarian and nonexploitative.

Within each of these, in turn, there is a division or further bifurcation having to do with method and means: On the Davos side, it is between the iron-fist-repression approach and one which is more cooptative. For the Porto Alegre pole, the question is horizontal or vertical modes of organization.

Strategically Wallerstein differentiated between the short and medium-term. The short term offers lesser-evil choices. We are moving in or into a time of chaos and disruption and the goal here should be to minimize the pain. In the medium term, it is just the opposite. Here the choice is either “Davos” or “Porto Alegre,” with no middle ground.

To deal with medium term prospects and choices, we need serious intellectual analysis with great openness of spirit, among large swathes of the population. The basic goal must be to reject economic growth in favor of de-commodification. As to how this can be done, we need experimentation. To this end, he envisions attempts to establish local or regional self-sufficiencies. Basic hallmarks of any new world, in any case, must be an end to the existence of all foreign military bases; and an end to basic inequalities based on gender, race, sexuality, etc.

This is not pie-in-the-sky utopian thinking. A chaotic situation multiplies the force of inputs; a small input can produce a very large effect.

Discussion

There were of course questions from the audience (which comprised probably 200+ people), as well as some prior comments on the papers from Moishe Postone, listed as “discussant.” I won’t attempt to reproduce all of this, even partially, but simply mention a few points that I found salient or important.

On bifurcation: Postone put forward that there are actually three possible future paths: besides those sketched by Wallerstein there is also the xenophobic-fundmentalist-populist path. And I later asked, in a question from the floor, what would constitute a noncapitalist exploitative system which could succeed capitalism as a world system.

Wallerstein seemed to reply that extreme rightism in all its varieties was an aspect of the Davos path, and that while the actual contours of a system which might emerge were impossible to predict, an exploitative but non-market-based system was perfectly possible.

Transnational capital and the formation of a transnational capitalist class (TNC) was also raised, but none of the panelists seemed to see this as an actuality or tendency. Harvey said that he didn’t see much difference now as compared with previously. There has been a restructuring of the capitalist class, but this is a constant occurrence, and at present has to do with different factions of capital vying with each other. Merchant capital (Walmart, e.g.) has become more prominent, and the rentier faction has been coming more to the fore (he referenced the drive to commodify and monopolize intellectual property as well as land rights in Africa).

In contrast with Wallerstein’s analysis, others did not consider this to be a final crisis of capitalism (not that Wallerstein ever used this phrase). Foley: capitalism is always evolving. Harvey: although this is not the final crisis, it is an inflexion point.

The question of ethics and Marxist analysis was raised as part of a long, involved, graduate-student sort of question. Harvey said that you have to look at what Marx does and not just the one-liners (“all history is the history of class struggle,” etc.). Marx emphasizes the dialectical transformation of social life, which is a movement across all its dimensions: daily life, the labor process, relation to nature, and so forth. (This is a prominent theme in Harvey’s book.) It is a mistake to isolate any particular dimension, and the same is true of the ethical aspect.

Wallerstein said that he agreed with all of this, except that: it is precisely the ethical question that we need to take up.

Related posts:

1. Capitalist crisis and left response

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

III

In this final section I want to work through a number of topics, including the adequacy of Martin’s take on Marx’s thought, and some characteristic moves and modes of thinking in Ethical Marxism. I will be critical here, because I think these are matters that are important to get right.

Marx

Let’s go back to the opening sentence of a passage quoted above: “In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests.” This doesn’t ring true, to my ears. Where does Marx talk about what leads or motivates people to question their circumstances broadly/deeply? And when does he talk about motivation on a broad scale by “material interests”? This is quite alien, it seems to me, to the way in which Marx approaches the question, and his conception of the relation between human activity and the materiality of their circumstances. He says, for example, in a wellknown passage, that history only poses problems for which there are solutions (“mankind…sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”) meaning that problems are revelatory of social contradictions which contain their own supercession, that solutions are immanent within the problems themselves. Now whether we believe that this Hegelian-derived view of history and social contradictions is on the right track or not, the relation of materiality to human practice and its possibilities is very different from the view that it is only material interests which motivate people, which I believe is really a mischaracterization of Marx.

This is an example of a view and portrayal of Marx in this book which is rather remote from the thinking of Karl Marx, to my understanding. Now I do not hold that our problems as revolutionaries would be solved or solvable if we just understood Marx or Marxism correctly. Far from it. On the other hand, it is of high importance from the standpoint of the emancipatory project to understand Marx aright, and it often looks to me that Martin does not.

A basic aspect of Martin’s delineation of Marx with which I take strong issue is his characterization of Marx as a positivist, as in the following passages.

As with the positivists, for Marx a ‘scientific’ theory of society and history would be purely descriptive, not normative…. Marx aimed to be scientific, not normative. It might even be said that Marx aimed to be scientific as opposed to normative. (34, 103)

Marx aimed to add the processes of human social and cultural development to a universal science of all material processes. The algorithms that represent (or govern) material processes that occur in different domains of the material world (the different fields of scientific investigation) are themselves related through algorithms: this is reductionism…. (411)

An algorithm is a process which will always produce the same result of a certain sort whenever it runs. (The easiest example is a set of rules for solving a problem which will invariably give the correct answer if followed precisely. Thus the process of solving a problem in long division which we all learned in grade school is an algorithm: you have simply to follow the sequence of rules, and the correct answer will be generated.) Martin represents Marx as believing that history works through an algorithmic process, and that he had discovered the algorithm of history (that is, the invariable rules governing the process, such that a certain outcome is predictable). (411, 429, 432, 479)

This is coupled (as it would have to be) with a portrayal of Marx’s view of historical processes as completely deterministic, so that the general future course of things would be determined with a great degree of inevitability. Thus Marx is described by Martin as simply talking “about the way the capitalist system works and that this systemic working would lead to things working out by and by [that is, leading to communism].” (104)

Is this Marx?

Is this a fair account of Marx’s thinking, or of Marxism? Yes, perhaps of some forms of Marxism, often dominant ones; but no, not of Marx’s thinking, and not of all Marxisms. On the one hand the sort of positivistic, utilitarian and even Hobbesian Marxism which is the object of Martin’s critique has certainly been a strand, even a prominent strand (especially within “actually existing” socialisms). But there is far more to Marx (and to the more vibrant strands of Marxism) than this, and some of Martin’s characterizations border on caricature.

So I think there is a basic inaccuracy here, a great deal of one-sidedness and misunderstanding of Marx. I’ll reiterate that Marx’s being right or wrong is in itself of not much moment. The importance of the question lies in the context of developing an adequate revolutionary thinking and theory. What is crucial is whether we have a theory or theories adequate to comprehend and bear fruit in the process of human liberation and the transformation of our social being. But then, Marx’s usefulness to this great enterprise will depend on what his thinking is, so let’s pursue that question for a moment. And here we need to make some basic distinctions.

First, there’s a differentiation to be made between the explicit statements of a theoretical program and historical schema which Marx sometimes makes (that in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy being the most obvious and wellknown⁵), and the actual theoretical and historical work which he carries out. Thus while of course Marx does make several grand programmatic announcements, many have noted that when it comes to concrete historical studies (notably The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France), although he is certainly understanding historical events from within the theoretical framework he has developed, he does not reason from a schema, but through (in Lenin’s phrase) a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, which in turn represent complications in, and often problems for, his general program.

It’s really impossible to see how this procedure, which is entirely characteristic of Marx (including in Capital), is accurately captured by either description, or algorithm, or positivistic notions of science. These do not describe what “science” is for Marx, and they are very far from capturing the analyses that Marx actually carried out.

The adequacy of this sort of conception of Marx’s thinking is made even more implausible when we take into consideration the various phases of his thought. Marx, in company with most great thinkers, goes through several discernible stages in his thought. Everyone is familiar with the distinction between early and mature Marx (the 1844 MS, on the one hand, and Capital on the other, say). But there are differences here too; for example The German Ideology, usually cited as if it were an instance of Marx’s later thinking, expresses a rather crude and somewhat positivistic programmatic standpoint, which is almost completely absent from Capital. (Martin at one point says that Marx has an affinity with John Stuart Mill on the basis that “both claimed that their work could proceed on a ‘purely empirical basis’,” [362-3] drawing these words from The German Ideology but also claiming that Marx repeats the claim elsewhere, which I do not believe is the case (at least not in works later than German Ideology).⁶)

It is true that while the theory and program of Capital are certainly not positivistic, there is an expression in several places of a rather deterministic historical scheme. But this too becomes no longer characteristic given the changes that occur in Marx’s thinking in the 1870s, as he came to grips with the three phenomena of the Paris Commune; the growth of the workers’ movement in Germany and its associated Marxism (of which Marx was very critical); and the increasing study of Marx in radical Russian circles, and the questions raised for the application of Marx’s schema in this situation. All of these raised questions as to the projections which could be drawn from Capital (not to mention the earlier programmatic statements of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), and Marx’s responses to these newly arisen occasions (Class Struggles in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme, and his reply – and its various drafts – to Vera Zasulich) sketch a much more open and undeterministic stance and theory than is to be found earlier. (Martin does mention the correspondence with Zasulich [275-77], but only to criticize Marx’s failure to raise “the question of place.”)

There is far more that could be said in relation to this question – about the explanatory structure underlying Capital (which bears no relation to a descriptive positivistic idea of science), about Marx’s explanations of contemporary history, etc., and quite a bit has been written on these topics – but what I’ve said is probably enough to make my point.

Reverse implication to origins

Continuing for a moment the discussion of Martin’s picture of the figure of Karl Marx and his thinking, let me cite what I find to be some quite astonishing statements:

One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that Marx by himself is not so interesting or exciting…. (360)

For Stalin, but perhaps even for Marx, Engels, and Lenin, intellectual ferment was not a good thing. (352)

…for Marx, all you need to know about agriculture is that it represents an outmoded form of production. (274)

I term these statements astonishing in that I find it difficult to believe that these judgments, peppered through the book on a diverse array of subjects, could come from a straightforward reading of Marx and an attempt to understand his thinking. Perhaps we simply differ in what we find in Marx. But my guess is that glosses on Marx like these arise from a bent towards reading Marx through the history of Marxism, and in particular reading Marx (and Engels and Lenin) through Stalin – or rather, through a fear of Stalinism. This becomes clear, I think, in a passage like that on 189-90, where Martin argues for a strong link between “Marxism’s resistance to the ethical ‘as such’, and Marxism’s tendency, an inherent tendency I would argue, toward economism.” This passage continues,

Indeed,…the difficulty is that Marxism (or simply the thought of Karl Marx, to be direct about this) entails a critique of reification, and yet Marxism, especially when it becomes only a structural “science” of the causality of things and interests…seems itself to reify. In practice, especially in the practice of Stalin in the Soviet Union, but not only there, this orientation has had, again, dire consequences. (190)

This reasoning, along the lines of holding that the seeds of Stalin were planted by Marx, is an example of an all-too-common mode of argument in Ethical Marxism, one of “reverse implication” from the characteristics of a phenomenon back to the attribution of those characteristics to its origins.

The sort of move I mean is exemplified in some of Martin’s arguments concerning human meat consumption, as well as with reference to 20^th century or contemporary imperialism, where he will begin by pointing to modern industrial meat production, or to imperialism. Having taken it as clear that this is obviously wrong (“the immense cruelty done to animals in the current food-production system and through human participation on that system is a great wrong that calls us to ethical action” [213], for example), he will generalize or hypostasize the basis in either case: carnivorism as the basis of industrial food production, or commodity-production as the basis of capitalist imperialism. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that, given that the final form (industrial food production, imperialism) is clearly wrong or evil, this basis must be ethically wrong.

The argumentative move, in other words, begins from the wrongness (evil) of a phenomenon, X; the basis of X is then generalized; this generalized or hypostasized basis (carnivorism, commodity production) is then projected back to a beginning or seed of X, which is then itself presumed to be wrong or evil.

This beginning is often characterized by Martin as the crossing of a boundary or threshold by human beings, a step that brought them into the territory of evil. If this sounds a lot like myths of the fall of man and the original sin, he has no problem with such similarities: “My own view…is that myths of a human fall point to a time when humans first began to eat inhuman animals on a regular basis.” (87) And “the fall into alienation is the emergence of the commodity form and the process of commodification” (266). On a different subject: “a threshold had to be crossed which allowed one half of a population (male) to understand the other half of the population (female) as objects of domination.” (236)

To draw this out a little more: The argument is that commodity-production, with its concomitant reduction (Martin believes) of everything to a “mere thing,” marks the threshold after which “all bets are off” ethically: “If you will do this, what will you not do? If you will cross this line, what line will you not cross?” (245)

There is a similar line of reasoning in relation to the animal question, and in this case Martin holds that the step into carnivorism was also the threshold of commodity production as well:

At some point in this transition, there must have been a moment when a fundamental distinction between animals and humans began to be made, as regards cruelty and some sort of basic standing in the world, and here we can see the roots of reification…. We can see the beginnings of commodity production. (260)

The projection backward presumes, for its argumentative legitimacy, a causal process leading from this threshold beginning to the present form. And Martin clearly believes this to be the case:

The first forms of commodity production initiate humanity into a world of things. The emergence of capitalism places the reification of humanity on a purely calculative basis, and from there all human relationships are brought under the brutal cash nexus. (250)

Bad reasoning

There are many aspects of this form of reasoning which are both untenable and disturbing. It is also, we should note parenthetically, not very congruent with Martin’s opposition to “inevitablism.” For here he appears to presuppose a deterministic unfolding from that beginning point, indeed a sort of teleological determinism – the end (industrial meat production, imperialism) is presumed to be in the beginning (the “fall” into carnivorism, commodity-production).

The form of Martin’s reasoning here also has a disturbingly close similarity to that which is often used by opponents of abortion, who project backward, beginning from the wrongness of killing a person, to the threshold whose crossing results in a complete human being (the moment of conception is the obvious line-crossing boundary), and conclude that wrongness can also be imputed to any deliberate ending of life following the crossing of that threshold.

And in fact the form of reasoning employed in this sort of reverse implication to origins (as I’m terming it), has nothing to recommend it.

It certainly does not generally follow, from the fact that a certain characteristic is true of the end result of a process, that the same characteristic can be attributed to the origin or beginning of that process. If this were the case, then the properties of a fully grown oak tree would be true of the acorn which was its seed — a very unsound inference. To reason in this way is to ignore real changes which occur in the development of any phenomenon, and the emergence of new and unique characteristics at new levels of development.

In Ethical Marxism, the idea of a threshold, a fall, the original evil of commodity production and an increasing evil with capitalism, involves a great deal of romanticization of pre-capitalist societies (see 102, 130, 149). Agricultural society “keeps people sane,” Martin says, while industrialization and mechanization “destroys human sanity” (55)

The ‘cell-form’ in Marx

The idea of a boundary or threshold is also related by Martin to another concept, that of the “cell-form” of a phenomenon, drawing this term from Marx:

The cell-form of a world that is upside-down is the commodity.…we might draw a line between [that is, connecting] the present functioning of systems and the cell-form of which Marx wrote. (250, 256)

In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital (Vol. 1), Marx analogizes the role of the commodity in capitalism to that of the cell of an organism, and terms the commodity-form the “economic cell-form.” (This is his only use of the term, to my knowledge.) He makes this analogy by way of explaining both why he begins with analysis of the commodity-form (although “to the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae”) and why previous investigators have not done likewise (“because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body”).

Martin, however, identifies this term with his own idea of the seed from which the present system grows, and attributes this to Marx and Engels:

One could argue that, for both Marx and Engels, part of what it means for there to be a given social system is that there is a prefiguration of the present in a “cell-form,” and that this cell-form can be seen in a threshold that is crossed by humankind. (239)

He then goes on to identify the “cell-form,” not only with his notion of a threshold, but with the irremediable fall of humanity:

…there is with Marx’s conception of the “cell-form” the notion that the first forms of commodity production let the cat out of the bag and there is little or no chance of putting the cat back in the bag. …there was a conjuncture, in prehistory, where the seeds of patriarchy, private property, commodity production, and even the state…and eventually capitalism were planted, in a single go. (243, 239)

It should be clear that the uses Martin makes of it have nothing to do with Marx’s use of this phrase. Indeed, looking to the analogy drawn in this metaphor to the cells of an organism, it’s clear that the cells of an organism only exist within the context of the whole organism; likewise with the relation of the commodity to the “organism” of capitalist society, from which Marx’s analysis proceeds by abstraction. (Continuing the comparison to the analysis of organic cells, Marx says, “In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.”)

This point is important not chiefly because it represents a misreading of Marx, but principally for the light it sheds on the character of the difference between Marx (and Marxism) and the manner in which Martin proceeds and the theory which he builds. For Marx the commodity is reached and known through abstraction from the whole of capitalism, and this “cell-form” in turn serves as a means of understanding the working of the whole at the most basic level of analysis. It is out of the sort of understanding of the present illustrated here that Marx draws his historical remarks (the path to the present) and – most importantly – his vision of future possibilities.

For Marx, communism is an inherent possibility of the present configuration of human society, of its contradictory social dynamic; his analysis points to this possibility. Communism is not for Marx, as it is for Martin (often), an ethico-religious vision, derived in some sense prior to any social analysis. And for Marx, I would argue, the ethical judgment on (that is, against) capitalism derives from the reality of this possibility or possibilities, not from an absolutist and logically prior judgment of capitalism or commodity-production as evil.

Obviously to say that Marx’s thinking differs in this way from Martin’s is not to decide the issue, but the way in which it differs does complicate both the picture drawn of Marx in Ethical Marxism and the use to which Martin often wants to put Marx’s “science.” For if Marx is to be simply used instrumentally for the achievement of a prior ethical project, then what is used will not really be Marx. Further, if we read Marx in this way, many of the sharp dichotomies set up by Martin – between fact and value, history and morality, etc. — fall away, at least within the ambit of Marx’s thinking.

One more thing

On the very first page Martin gives his approval to the thesis (pioneered in a neo-Aristotelean vein by G.E.M. Anscombe) “that there are basic ethical questions about which nothing can be said, and that it would be a violation of ethics to presume to give an ‘explanation’ as to why it is wrong to do certain things…that the violation occurs even in the idea that certain situations might become questions, brought into the discursive realm.” (1) At several points in the book, Martin’s judgment concerning a phenomenon is a simple “it is evil” or “it is wrong” (see for example 27, 43, 44, 353), and at one point he describes his aim as being “to establish the place of evil in social theory.” (33)

There are several problems, as I see it, with this way of proceeding. Most obviously, this sort of thesis would seem to lend itself all too easily to the confirmation of parochial prejudices of a particular time, place, or culture. But more broadly, such a stance seems to pose itself, as a matter of principle, against investigation and discussion of certain issues, to say in effect, “This is obviously wrong; end of discussion.”

This is not to say that it’s  sometimes not be appropriate to make this sort of simple judgment (“it is wrong”); but this is a matter of context, not of principle. And what makes this principle particularly problematic in the circumstances of this book, is the way in which it can interrelate to the “reverse implication” method described above. For here the end-phenomenon, from which the “reverse implication” begins, is first made the subject of a categorical judgment. The beginning “cell form” or boundary point is then also supposed to be subject to the same judgment. (“This is evil.”) But if the initial judgment is not itself supposed to be liable to any further discussion, then the reverse-implication procedure becomes even more dangerous.

In conclusion

To recapitulate the general thesis of Ethical Marxism in a very simplified form (and which I hope is not a caricature), Martin’s stance is that a moral impulse is needed as the beginning point of the revolutionary project, and that a more fully developed ethics is needed as both continuing impetus and guide toward a possible future “redeemed world,” the vision of which stems from “the religious perspective.” The role of Marxism is to provide a description of the lineaments of the present and to help map out the means toward this future (means which must themselves be evaluated ethically). If this is a fair, albeit extremely bare-bones, account, then there is a strong similarity here to a very familiar picture of a dichotomy of fact and value, of description and prescription, in this case with Marxism describing the facts and ethics supplying the values. Such a bifurcation seriously under-represents the role of explanation, which is certainly not strictly factual or descriptive, and the ways in which all of these – describing, explaining, valuing – interrelate and interpenetrate as aspects (moments, if you will) of an overall process which Marx terms (human) practice.

In fact I think we have to begin at least from this point, from a picture of human life and social activity in which thinking, evaluating, projecting, theorizing, and acting are aspects of a continuous social process, in which all social life is understood as essentially practical, and “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice.” (Thesis 8)

This may seem too much like the “work from what exists in the world and everything will work out bye and bye” stance which Martin criticizes strongly in Marx. But where else can we begin than from the existing world, understood not in a flat, descriptive, positivistic way, but in its dynamic motion, self-cleavages, differentiating processes, and the idealizing and idea- and truth-processes which human practice (praxis) creates – and of course with no guarantee or promise that it will all work out?

If I end here on what is in a sense all-too-familiar ground — an evocation of praxis, and of a particular strain of Marxism⁷ – this is surely an indication of the limitations in my own attempts to rethink the revolutionary project. I certainly hold by the above sketch as a minimal orientation, but, as may be obvious, the critical examination of Ethical Marxism put forward here has not been carried out from the vantage point of any worked out solution to the problems which Martin has attempted to solve.

*******

This is a strong aspect of wandering, even meandering, in the development of themes and topics in Ethical Marxism, and the book’s order is generally associative and train-of-thought rather than by topic and development or logical deployment of argumentation. Themes are dropped and then picked up later but in a different key, arguments are left undeveloped, and emotive expression sometimes seems to overwhelm the cognitive development of content. As anyone knows who’s read his work, this is Martin’s style, and it has its strengths and its charms; but it’s not a style of writing and intellectual construction which make it easy to be certain that one has, in a paraphrase or account such as I’ve attempted, captured exactly what he intends. If I haven’t captured his meaning, though, I trust that others will set me right.

More importantly, the question at issue in this book and in my engagement with it, is the shape of the communist project in the present era. Bill Martin has been striving (here and in previous and subsequent writings) to explore and put forward a view of what that project must encompass. I’ve indicated the ways in which I think the approach he wants to take is seriously flawed. But I’m conscious, too, of how incomplete are my own views and how pressing is the necessity of collective work on this urgent political and intellectual and practical task.

Notes

Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
3. John Steele: Marxism, Politics, and Evil

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

II

In some sense Ethical Marxism is a long meditation on the crying need for liberation from the brutalities and morass of today’s world, but also the need to surpass Marxism-as-it-has-been. Indeed, Martin’s point is that these needs are crucially interrelated and that fulfillment of the former depends upon accomplishment of the latter. I think this is true and important – in fact I could not agree more. But when we come to the question of how we are to surpass the now-dead Marxism of our fathers, we have some differences. Most basically, I do not believe that the most essential thing, in order for Marxism to become an emancipatory theoretical structure, is that it be reoriented around “the ethical moment” as its basis. I believe that an ethics is founded upon the revolutionary project, rather than founding it, as Martin argues. Rather than morality being the core or foundation of a truly revolutionary politics, as Martin argues, I believe that the political is more basic, and that ethics finds its foundation within larger human projects, including that of an emancipatory politics. Obviously this is a basic point, and thrashing it out (or at least indicating a direction of argument) is one basic aim of the remainder of this paper.

There are also some matters of detail relating to Ethical Marxism which have their own importance, and which will also consume much of the space in what lies below. My concern is with several characteristic ways of arguing and framing things that Martin makes use of, which I believe are unfruitful or worse, and will not take us very far in terms of the discussion we need to be having. (These will be the subject of Part III of this essay.)

The movement from Is to Ought

Martin often tends to pose issues in terms of dichotomies (science/ethics, interest-based vs. ethical motivation, etc.); one of the most pervasive and basic in his thinking is the contradiction he proposes between a politics based on what at one point he calls “real ethics,” and a politics based “mere utilitarianism and calculation based on interests.” (211-12) Now one could question the adequacy of this and others of the dichotomous contrasts Martin sets up (and I’ll touch on this below), but for the moment I want to explore some of the tensions and problems that arise in Martin’s argument from it.

I’ll start from the following passage:

In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests. Interests are experienced differently in different strata of society…; for there to be a larger change in society, however, there has to be a more general crisis, indeed a crisis felt by all sectors of society. In Lenin’s memorable description, the crisis has to be such that people cannot any longer live in the ways in which they have been living, and the ruling class cannot any longer rule in the ways in which it has been ruling. The Marxist perspective is that, short of an actual deep crisis in the social system, people do not (again – generally, broadly, deeply) go into motion against the existing order. People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order. (187)

On the one hand it seems that Martin accepts that this is the case. Although he does not say so directly, contextual indications are that Martin believes this to be so – that people generally do not go up against the established order in ordinary circumstances (in “times of ‘normal functioning’,” as he puts it), even though it is an unjust order. (And how would it be possible not to believe this? It seems quite clear that it’s the case.)

On the other hand, at several points throughout the book Martin advances the thesis that without ethical/moral motivation and intention, a better world cannot come to be: that moral motivation is necessary to a revolution which is not merely a ‘reaction formation’. And as noted above, Martin believes that “…the Kantian thesis is right: a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

So it almost seems that Martin has, on the one hand, set up a problem which he believes must be solved, in order for any revolution to be truly a step in the actual liberation of humanity: The revolution must be made out of a moral motivation. But at the same time he also seems to believe that this is not (is never?) the case: “People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order.” So he has set a problem for any revolution, it seems, which must be solved but which has not been solved and perhaps cannot be solved.

I do not mean to give an argument simply based on this contradiction of phrases. But I do want to ask what it indicates. It is very much as if Martin’s position is that although people broadly do not make revolution out of moral motivation, they ought to do so. Clearly this reproduces the is/ought gap at a higher level (the meta-level): why should we be moral? But when it is posed this way it is clear, I think, that Martin does not provide a way of bridging this gap.

Why should we be moral?

Martin proposes that, in addition to the Marxist description of the structure of the present world, only ethics can bridge the gap between the wretched present and what he sometimes calls the “redeemed world” of a possible future. Suppose we accept that ethics can perform this function. There would still remain the problem of: why take up this ethical stance? Ethics can’t itself provide the reason, or the motive, to be ethical, or to take the ethical bridge to the future. We might answer that it’s necessary to begin from “the ethical moment” because that’s the only way to reach “the redeemed world.” But that would presuppose that we already have the impetus toward that redeemed world – yet it was precisely this impetus which ethics was supposed to be necessary in order to provide in the first place.

I don’t want to seem unnecessarily paradoxical or logic-chopping here. The problem that Martin runs into, as I see it, can be described more simply from another angle. He has written a book which is addressed, in the main, to Marxists and to those who believe in the great desirability or necessity of gaining or moving toward the “redeemed future.” And he is arguing that Marxism does not provide the resources for reaching this possible future, but that a revamped theory, with ethics at its core, an Ethical Marxism, is necessary if such a future is to be reached. Martin believes, moreover, that moral feeling is the actual basis of people’s entering into revolutionary practice or oppositional political engagement in the first place, and his claim is that this “ethical moment” has not been theorized, and must be. (That, at least, is one of the lines of thinking in this book.) In this context the “why be moral?” question does not arise, given the assumption that those addressed already operate, in their basic political outlook, from a moral motivation.

But Martin also believes that, not only must this moral basis be realized and made explicit within the consciously revolutionary ranks, but it must also form the basis, very broadly among the people, in a mass revolutionary upsurge. “Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” (155)

I think it actually is true that a problem has been set which cannot be solved within the terms in which it is posed. But perhaps the quandary stems from these terms as they are understood in Ethical Marxism. I want to pursue this thought by exploring briefly some of the central concepts or markers which Martin deploys – ethics/morality – politics – Marxism and Marx’s thinking – all of which I believe should be understood or taken (along with their interrelations) differently than he does.

Ethics and politics

This is a large and important topic, in my view, and there’s far more to be said about it than I can possibly say here, or that I’m capable of saying generally. This should be a topic of discussion among all who work for human liberation, or want to. But I think I can say enough to make clear why I believe that Martin’s approach to the question will not lead very far.

Let’s begin from the following passage in Ethical Marxism:

Yes, the new society has to be against the ancien regime, but even more it has to be for the future and future possibilities…. It could be said that the dialectic of negativity is essential, but it is also in danger of becoming purely reactive without the notion of an underdetermined, redeemed future…. The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (379-80)

Let us accept (as I do) that we need both of these dialectics, as Martin describes them, that we will be lost unless the necessary negation is interwoven with a striving toward the open redeemed future. The question is whether ethics is necessary to provide a link or bridge between the two, and whether ethics is adequate or sufficient to link them. (The question is not, it should be clear, whether “Marxism is ready, in a new synthesis, to accept that ethical questions are real questions” [256]; to deny that ethics is necessary for the “bridging” function is not to deny that ethical questions are real.)

Early in the book Martin talks about “the call of the future,” which he links with the concern expressed by Kant for “the most distant future generations,” and which he characterizes as an ethical demand. “In some sense,” he goes on to say, “my only argument in this book is the concern itself is the ground of the ‘science’, of systematic theorizing. That is the essence of Ethical Marxism.” (27)

Here the ethical demand embodied in a concern for the future is seen as both motive-force and ground for the sort of theorizing that Marx gave us. Sometimes this “call of the future” is characterized in terms of vision. In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

Unless this sort of ethically-motivated vision motivates and frames the intentions of those who are involved in making a new future, Martin believes, a “redeemed future” will not come about. (“Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” – 155)

Ethics-based vs. interest-based?

It’s true, I think, that without a vision of the future, no popular uprising or revolutionary upsurge will change the social fundamentals of class society. Both a vision of communism (in a general way) and the conviction that it is possible are necessary to a coming about of a communist future. But why must this vision be founded, independently from the social and historical process, and even independently of a communist political project, in an ethics or morality? Martin’s predominant line of thinking, as I understand it, is that this sort of independent ethical basis is necessary if a would-be revolutionary politics is not to become an interest-based realpolitik. But his argument for it crucially depends on a series of dichotomous bifurcations: fact/value, history/morality, interest-based and ethically-based actions (as well as on a strictly Kantian-derived definition of the ethical), as in the following passages:

Either I take the core of moral theory to be the treatment of the other as an end-in-herself or -himself, or I simply take it as realpolitik that I find myself in the midst of a war of all against all…. (69)

It can…be argued that, without an “ethical grounding”…, “politics” can only mean a set of tactical considerations concerning the machinations and mechanisms of power, and not a “thinking of the polis,” particularly a thinking of the just polis…. (391)

The hold of these sorts of bifurcations on Martin’s thinking can be seen in his claim that Lenin’s internationalism should be seen as ethically-based. Why? Because “it goes against the grain of the existing society, and it does this on the basis of principle,” a principle “not based on a narrow conception of interest.” (164)

Do these alternative bases for a politics, interest-based and ethically-based, exhaust the field? To see how this may not be the case (and I don’t think it is), I want to look at a couple of observations by Mao Zedong, whom Martin characterizes as having “restitched” the ethical into Marxism. (391).

Mao said, speaking of his youth, “First we were revolutionaries, and as a result we became Marxists.” That captures very well what I am trying to capture with the idea of Ethical Marxism: first we see that there is something very wrong about the way that society is set up, and as a result we look for a systematic understanding of society that will allow us to move forward and try to make things right.”\ (340-41)

Martin takes it that becoming a revolutionary, that is, one who becomes dedicated to the systematic restructuring of social relations, must be based upon a primary insight which is ethical in character, and which provides guidance in the enterprise and a linkage to the “redeemed future” in this intial insight that “something is very wrong.”

There are a couple of things to be said initially about this schema. First, note how this passage brings out again the dual function which Martin depends upon the ethical to perform: both beginning and bridge, providing both the initial impetus which brings the actor into revolutionary practice, and the linkage to the redeemed future (the vision of which is to be provided by the basically untheorized religious dimension).

At the same time, it is clear here why Martin needs the “bridging” function. For there is no reason why an initial perception that “something is very wrong” will not go in a sort of revenge direction, or toward what Martin calls a reaction-formation. But if this is true, what justifies calling the initial perception ethical? We seem to be in the same position, whether we say that the initial impetus to revolutionary politics is ethical insight or an interest-based motivation. In either case we need (on Martin’s set-up) a more fully-fledged ethics to act as “bridge.”

The role of practice

We seem to be consistently drawn into conceptual and logical tangles as we trace the implications of what’s said in Ethical Marxism. I think this should be taken as a marker of some basic inconsistencies or jumbles in the theory advanced in this book. I hope to point to some possibilities in the way of emerging from this thicket. I want to proceed by way of one more quotation, both from Martin and from Mao.

…many of [Mao’s] popular formulations have a distinctively “categorical imperative” ring to them – probably most of all the famous statement, “Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all come down to one thing: It is right to rebel against reactionaries.”  (194)

Let’s start from a fuller quotation of Mao’s famous statement in its original context:

The immense complexity of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: ‘It is justifiable to rebel’ For centuries people have been saying: ‘It is justifiable to oppress or to exploit people, but it is wrong to rebel’. Marxism turned this thesis upside down. That is a great contribution, a thesis established by Marx from the struggle of the proletariat. Basing their action on this thesis, people have shown defiance, struggled, and worked for socialism.³

In making an interpretation here, a lot turns on a question of priority. Should the Marxism put forward by Mao in this passage be understood as beginning from a primordial ethical judgment (rebellion is right, justified)? Or should rebellion be seen as the primary action, generating a for-or-against field, with Marxism beginning from affirmation of the rebellion, putting oneself on the side of those who rebel? In the latter case, which I’d argue for, the justifiability is not an abstract (or an a priori) judgment, but a practical one which is simultaneous with ranging oneself with those who rebel.

Putting this together with the “first revolutionaries, then Marxists” statement, we can see how (as I see it) the basic movement is from rebel or revolutionary practice to Marxism as the affirmation and comprehension of that practice within a larger, deeper context, and then movement forward from there. This primacy of practice is essential for Mao, as for Marx and a revolutionary Marxism. Ethics in this conception is formed upon and around a basic practical orientation. (The movement here is similar to Badiou’s sequence of event, subject and truth-process, where it is the recognition of the event which founds both subject and truth-process, with an ethics following out of this nexus.⁴)

What is primary is the movement in the world, practice, and it’s this which generates the need which is not only what has led, historically, to taking up Marx, but which is also necessary in order to come at Marx in such a way as to see his theory as an understanding of the present which shows a different future as possible. At that point, in coming to grips with the revolutionary political vista thus opened up, there are many problems to be solved, including ethically. None of this movement from practice to theory guarantees anything, of course, and certainly not a good or fruitful understanding of Marx. The point is not a sure-fire method of getting everything right, but a conceptual relationship and construal of what’s going on.

The point in all this is not, of course, justification through quotations from Mao or l’explication du texte. But it is significant that these statements can (and I think should) be understood differently than they are taken by Martin.

But as well, I do believe that something along the lines of the above is how we need to understand the relation, not only between ethics and Marxism, but ethics and an emancipatory politics, and between each of these and a primary social stirring in the world.

Let us sketch the differences by way of a few questions. Are we, principally, Marxists because we are revolutionaries, or revolutionaries because we are Marxists? I think it is clear that the primacy must go to the first: Marxists because revolutionaries.  But how about the question with a closer relevance to Martin’s argument: Are we revolutionaries due to our ethical principles (ethical stance, an ethical insight or vision), or is there an ethics which crucially follows upon the taking up of the revolutionary project, which stems from an emancipatory political project? I believe the latter is true.  And finally, is politics an autonomous field of human social practice (or of truth-processes, as Badiou argues), or does it require to be founded upon a religio-ethical vision, as Martin believes? Here my own answer is less certain (I am not sure whether, or to what extent, the political field should be seen as autonomous), but I would not see it as needing to be founded in ethics or religious vision.

Thus I am arguing that both our taking up Marxism (and the sort of Marxism we take up), and our ethics (and the character of this ethics) follow upon and stem from our primary step in practice, which must be understood politically. There is no automaticity here, that is, it is not the case that anyone who takes up a revolutionary project thereby takes it up in the best way or draws the right conclusions. There is plenty of scope, and necessity, for thinking, argument, and investigation. And the whole matter is far more complex than the schemata I’ve offered might seem to indicate. On the one hand there are many ways and even degrees of “being a revolutionary”; and on the other, there are many types and aspects of ethics, for ethics are associated with overarching projects (understood in the Sartrean manner), and there is more than one project in any human life.

Without going into these complications, though, I hope to have said enough to indicate a different way of coming at the questions of ethics, politics, and Marxism.

Notes

Related posts:

1. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
2. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3
3. John Steele: Marxism, Politics, and Evil

Is Marxism, or revolutionary politics generally, sufficient for human emancipation? In Ethical Marxism, Bill Martin argues that Marxism requires ethics as the necessary foundation of any politics which may actually be capable of leading to this goal. Following is the first part of an essay critically examining this book and this thesis. The entire piece will appear in three parts,  over the next few days.

Khukuri features several essays by Bill Martin, and he is a participant in the Kasama Project, with which both this site and Kasama are associated. He is the author of a number of books, including Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rack, 1968-1978, and (with Bob Avakian) Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics, as well as others.

This is the second engagement with Ethical Marxism to appear on this site. The first, by Vern Gray can be found here.

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

In this essay I’ll be attempting to come to grips with Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, a major effort by Bill Martin to map out the sort of theory he believes to be necessary in the 21^st century for revolution and human liberation. I’ll first try to lay out Martin’s principal claims and lines of thought, followed by some questions and critique.

This is a large book which brings a number of themes, subjects and questions into play. I will only be dealing with the essential line of argument and thought, concerning Marxism, politics and ethics. Specifically, I will not be able to enter into some concrete questions which Martin casts as ethical and to which he devotes a large proportion of space in the book: imperialism, animals and the human consumption of meat, and the question of place. These are major parts of the book, not only in bulk but conceptually too, as attempts to both configure political questions ethically (imperialism) and to situate ethical questions (meat-eating) within a Marxist context. But although this study does examine some of the forms of argument which emerge in these areas, I have not been able to consider the substance of these questions, as they are framed in Ethical Marxism.

As will become clear, I think the theory sketched in Ethical Marxism is seriously flawed, and I will often be sharply critical. But I want to salute at the outset Martin’s attempt at the great and necessary task undertaken here, the refiguration of Marxism in the light of past impasses and present needs. I hope I’ll succeed in making clear the ways and extent to which I believe that the questions and problems which Martin is attempting to solve by means of this approach are very real and unresolved problems for all revolutionaries in this era.

I

The principal and overall thesis of Ethical Marxism (EM) is that ethics and politics need each other, that neither by itself is sufficient – sufficient for a just society, for revolution, for the emancipation of humanity, for the redemption of the world. On the one hand “ethics does not have, by itself, what it takes to be ethical” (25; numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in EM). That is, ethics in itself does not have the power to make effective its own insights and conclusions, cannot of itself bring the good and the right into being in the world: “to make these things a real force in the world, we also need something like Marxism” (26). On the other hand, neither does politics (or history or economics) have what it takes to be other than realpolitik, another way of regulating or taking part in the scramble among human beings and groups in pursuit of self-interest.

Martin argues that there is a “kind of vision that is absolutely necessary for the transformation of society and yet is underdetermined by systematic study of the ‘social evidence.’ In terms of modalities, the vision is necessary for the transformation, but the vision does not represent the necessity of the transformation itself.” (x) This vision springs, Martin believes, from what he calls “the religious perspective.

Since the vision of the future does not spring directly or necessarily from a study of the present, but yet this vision does not represent or imply its own necessity, there is still a gap, which Martin proposes to bridge through ethics: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos [end or goal] might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps.” (49)

Martin relates these three aspects or moments – scientific description/explanation, ethical prescription, and future-oriented vision – to the three questions, which Kant thought encompassed the concerns of reason: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? He also seems to relate them, as Kant did, to what he sees as three discontinuous discourses: science, ethics, and religion. (Although at one point Martin makes ethics central, as well, to vision: “…the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of ethical relation at its core” [160]. In general the emphasis throughout is on the discontinuity of science from both ethics and “the religious dimension,” with little or no theorization of differences between the latter two.

Thus “this book is about how the ethical point, or what I sometimes call the ‘ethical moment’, is indeed needed, and along with it intentionality and responsibility (and agency) and even a discourse that partakes of transcendence and theology.” (4) Such a perspective, he argues, is vitally needed in order to strengthen Marxism to enable it to “become a more powerful instrument for guiding humanity in going from an unjust and unsustainable world to a global community of mutual flourishing.” (4)

On the one hand this is posed as an external critique, in that it is grounded outside of Marxism as such, in both religious and ethical perspectives. (In the latter case Martin takes Kant to be the definatory figure.) But on the other hand Martin believes he is pointing to something that is present but unacknowledged and untheorized, both in Marx (“Marx’s work is permeated with moral concepts” – 2) and in the life of revolutionary movements. In pointing to the need for “the ethical moment” he is reaching for “a conception that is at work in actual revolutionary processes, and that would play an even greater role in human emancipation and critical emancipatory theory if it were clarified and embraced for what it is.” (14)

Although at one point describing the project of the book as one of making explicit and fleshing out what is already implicit or taken for granted in Marx (230), generally and on the whole Martin seems to be working from the conception of a Marx and Marxism which has no place for ethics (or intentionality either), but only for the description and projection of material forces.

Martin’s most basic thesis, then, is that Marxism and revolutionary theory generally, on the one hand, and ethics and the religious dimension, on the other, need each other in order to fulfill their own most basic aims and functions. The aspect that receives by far the most attention in this book is the need that Marxism has for ethics. This is a work addressed chiefly to those who see themselves as within or deriving from the Marxist tradition, arguing for the necessity of “the ethical moment.”

(Although the religious perspective would appear to be equally important to Martin’s overall conception, this aspect receives little sustained focus here, although it does make a reappearance in the book’s Conclusion, where religious narratives are described as “stories that people themselves tell in the living of their lives under specific conditions, but under the twin imperatives of mortality and the possibility of redemption,” a sort of story and language which is “both near and far from Marx.” [397])

Argument

The argument for Ethical Marxism in a nutshell is that the creation of a ‘social society’ has to issue both from a political-economic analysis and a moral recognition of what is morally wrong about the antisocial form of society. (179)

This is one of Martin’s most succinct statements of what he aims to show (it’s not actually an argument). In the process of attempting to show this, the principal argument of the book is that Marxism has not and cannot in itself generate the ought which is necessary for a process which is truly revolutionary and emancipatory, and that Marxism’s attempted theorization of a revolutionary imperative in terms of interests is radically insufficient and must be supplemented by a separately-based ethical imperative.

Obviously this depends on the supposition that Marxism posits a purely interest-based motivation and imperative for revolution. We’ll return to this important question, which is related to Martin’s conception of a Marxism which positions itself as a positivistic science. But first let’s look at how the argument of Ethical Marxism develops.

At one point Martin lays it out along the following lines:

The most pressing ethical concern is the hardest thing not only to accomplish, but even to thematize, even to begin to get people to grapple with….Certainly there are ways in which power and ‘things’ work, and…even while these workings have to be studied and understood and grappled with from a strategic perspective, it is precisely the reduction to causal ‘thingness’ that is the essence of economism, or, to put the point the other way around, it is the complete setting aside of any consideration of the thing that ought to be done in some matrix of pure causality and interest that is the essence of economism. Lenin saw this, in his critique of economism, and yet, out of the orthodox Marxist refusal of the ethical, did not thematize the point this way….This refusal has had consequences, indeed dire consequences [and] overcoming this limitation is absolutely essential for any future Marxist project. (189)

(The “dire consequences” here would seem to refer to events in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s ascendancy, and indeed Martin later points to the Stalin period as “probably the main reason why there has to be a way of articulating the ethical with Marxism – or else it would probably be better not to have Marxism any more.” [302])1

Martin’s analysis is that Marxism, conceived simply as a science which describes and explains the dynamics of capitalism and projects an historical sequence, offers at best the sort of interest-based politics which follows from its explanation of history in terms of class struggle, and that such a politics will be equivalent to a realpolitik power-politics and can easily (or perhaps is bound to) issue in the perversions of the revolutionary process seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin. For Marx, he holds, “it is only a happy by-product that socialism and ultimately communism would be good for humanity…; instead, these social forms are inevitable… these forms are simply what will occur in the objective unfolding of the material dialectic of history.” (392)

Just the realization that more is needed, or the merely implicit exemplification of this realization (as seen, Martin believes, in the example of Lenin’s polemic against economism in What Is To Be Done) – this is quite insufficient. The only remedy is the explicit “thematization of the ethical” and the bringing of the ethical into politics, for “…a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

Materialism

One concern in pursuing this thesis (which takes Martin in many directions) is to maintain a philosophically materialist outlook:

The aspect of the struggle to overcome capitalism that has to do with justice and the aim of creating a good society remains subordinate and epiphenomenal [in Marx]. My argument in this book is that, if there are not at least key moments when these terms are not explicitly thematized and pursued in their own right, then this struggle cannot be carried through. The question remains how this thematization and motivation can be understood within an historical materialist framework, but my hope is that it can…. (155)

Obviously the concern here – what Martin at times calls “the ethico-ontological problem” (220), is to ground ethics immanently, that is, in this world, as opposed to an other, transcendent, world. Martin, it seems clear, wants to remain on the materialist ground of Marxism; but he wants to expand the meaning of that materialism. But although this is clearly his desire, it can’t be said that he is able to resolve the ethico-ontological problem, how to explain the genesis and status of the ethical within a general materialist ontological framework. At best he expresses a hope (as above), or points to a need, as in the following passage:

…there ought to be an argument for the material role that the ethical, and the discourse of the good, needs to play in creating a good society. In other words, if economics, politics and history cannot do what they were supposed to do, then we had better consider the materiality of the ethical – which means grappling with the materiality of evil. (48)

He does, though, point to indications that there must be some sort of materiality of the ethical, or indications that he thinks imply this. He points to what he believes to be gaps, gaps which can only be bridged by the ethical: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps” (49), and “…there are gaps in Marx’s analysis that can only be addressed in irreducibly normative terms” (103).

Gaps

Over the course of the book, Martin describes several gaps of different character, in each case only bridgeable, he believes, by the ethical. These gaps could be grouped under the following headings:

Most obviously, there is the gap between description and prescription, the gap between description/explanation and normative prescription which is demonstrated, he says, by “the irreducibility of vocabularies (the causal and the value-driven)” (403).

This is clearly the underlying thread of the book: that no amount or depth of description and explanation of the workings and dynamics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Marx and Marxism gives us, will generate the sort of moral imperative, the “ought,” which is necessary both to overthrow this system and to go beyond a “reaction formation” to build a genuinely different society. Further, that this gap is made larger and more pressing by the phenomena of colonialism, and in the 20^th century (and the 21^st) by imperialism. (See 102 – 155 or so, within the section of the book on “Imperialism as the Ethical Problem of Our Time”; “reaction formation” is introduced on 121.)

There is also the gap between necessity and possibility, between what must happen and what may potentially be brought into existence. This is the argument that historical necessity would obviate human freedom and particularity. But, given that the necessity of Marx’s historical template is questionable today in any case, we face the question (present in any case but brought home by the failure of Marxist inevitabilism) of how to understand the generation and actualization of possibilities. (At one point Martin describes his aim as “a ‘postinevitablist’ Marxism that is reconfigured in terms of ethical themes” – 191.) Such an understanding, he believes, must centrally involve the ethical.

His argument runs along the following lines:

Such a scheme presented as inevitability is either theology or strategic audacity; it is only in such a scheme presented as possibility, however, that the history and possible future of humanity actually matters….We are back into the problem of theodicy…in which case ‘redemption’ is not really redemption, this life is not a ‘real fight’ (James), there are no actual people who actually matter involved in history, but only the god of historical inevitability…. (158)

Rather than laws necessarily generating certain results, the laws of history “ought to be understood instead as ‘laws of possibility’, ways of theorizing where the openings might occur in the existing society that would allow for something different and better to arise,” thus introducing “an irreducible element of normativity.” (160, 268)

In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

The question of vision is also conceived by Martin as invoking “the religious dimension.” and it’s worth pausing a moment to ask how he conceives the relation of ethical and religious. At one point he speaks of a confidence that is needed which “holds central faith in the principles that exploitation, domination, and oppression are wrong, that we are ethically compelled to struggle against every form that these things take, and that another world is possible.” (409) He believes such a confidence is not only ethical but also religious in the sense that it is a faith both in these ethical principles and in the possibility of a different world.

The “vision thing” also brings us to the gap between destruction and construction. Revolutions involve both, but there is a danger of a construction which is merely a “reaction-formation,” a new which will not be qualitatively different or better because it is simply built through a negation of or reaction to the old. Only ethics, once again, can bridge the gap between revolutionary negation and destruction, and the vision of a redeemed future (a vision whose source he finds in “the religious dimension” of human existence).

The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (380)

Now these gaps are supposed to show, not only the necessity of the ethical, but to imply its materiality (see above). The argument for this would be along the following lines (this is strongly implied, I think, in Martin’s account, although not quite stated as suchⁱⁱ): If there are lacunae and gaps in Marx’s schema of explanation and projection, such that the gaps can only be bridged normatively, then (a) there is a need for the normative in order to make Marx’s account complete or coherent, and (b) if Marx’s account is overall materialist, then whatever it takes to fill these gaps must have some material status.

Presuming that I’ve correctly captured Martin’s argument, it’s a troublesome one logically, and I don’t think it really goes through very well. For one thing, although it’s asserted that this is so, it is never really demonstrated that only the ethical or normative can bridge these gaps. Why cannot there be some other way of filling these gaps? (In fact I believe there are other ways, as I’ll try to indicate below.)

Even more bothersome from a logical point of view is the status of (b): from the fact that there are gaps in a materialist account, it’s hard to see why it would necessarily follow that whatever is needed to fill the gaps must also be material. Take, as a rather highly charged parallel, the anti-evolutionist argument that there are irreducible gaps in the Darwinist (materialist) theory of evolution, which can only be bridged by a divine creative force. Suppose we granted that argument, would it follow that this “divine force” is therefore material? Of course the creationists and others who put this forward believe, on the contrary, that the “argument from gaps” shows the incompleteness of a materialist explanation, which must therefore be supplemented by an independent spiritual reality. But if materialism is ones axiomatic basis then presumably the argument would simply mean that the “divine force” is actually material: if there is an explanatory gap in a theory, then the presumption would be that whatever is necessary to bridge that gap will have a material status. But if materialism is already presupposed, it’s hard to see how the “argument from gaps” can be an argument for the materiality of ethics.

Sometimes Martin takes a different tack, which, at least as I see it, is more promising as a way of finding a basis for an ethics in human social materiality. Proposing “flourishment” as a translation of the Greek eudaimonia (an important term in Aristotle’s ethical discussions), Martin says that “even if flourishment might be understood in different ways in different times or places, or even if it is barely understood at all, we humans are good at recognizing what is not flourishment, and in knowing we need something else,” and that even if this sense may be little more than a bare feeling or reaction, “it is from this feeling that normative social theory develops.” (59) The overall human project, in which human good is based, would then be “to create possibilities for human flourishment.” (64: he calls it “the Aristotelian answer,” but it seems clear, at least during these pages, that it is also Martin’s answer.) Although these ideals of flourishment would differ historically, the notion would provide a common (formal) criterion of the good, with evil occurring “when possibilities for flourishment are cut off through the efforts of some human agency….” (63)

This seems, as I say, more promising, both with regard to the material rooting of morality and as a conception which can be integrated with Marxism, or which it might be argued is something presupposed by Marx. But although this line of thought is taken up by Martin over the course of ten pages or so at one point, it is not pursued systematically in the book.

Notes

Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3
3. John Steele: Marxism, Politics, and Evil